Tag: JAMES ANGLETON

  • Jefferson Morley, Our Man in Mexico


    Jefferson Morley was one of the very few writers in the mainstream press who actually tried to print stories that indicated there was more to the John Kennedy assassination than the Warren Commission claimed. In his long tenure at the Washington Post he actually was responsible for getting into that publication two stories that showed there was more to the Oswald story than met the eye. Specifically, these were the long 1994 story on John Elrod and Lee Oswald, and a later story on the work of John Newman who was working on his book Oswald and the CIA. Two other stories that he worked on while at the Post were the attempts by Michael Scott to secure the purloined manuscript of his father, CIA officer Winston Scott, and the cover-up by the CIA of the role of George Joannides with the Cuban exile group the DRE in New Orleans in the summer of 1963.

    These last two form the framework for his recent book Our Man In Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA. Morley was an acquaintance of the attorney for Michael Scott who was trying to get the manuscript of his father’s book, entitled Foul Foe. There were things in the manuscript the CIA clearly did not want disseminated to the public. The long struggle ended with a little more than half the manuscript being handed over to the son. The way Morley integrates the other aspect of his quest is through Lee Harvey Oswald’s activities in the summer and fall of 1963. Joannides was the Agency case officer for the Cuban exile group called the Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil (DRE). In addition to making raids into Cuba for the Agency, this group interacted with Oswald in New Orleans in the summer of 1963. Most famously through the personage of Carlos Bringuier. Bringuier got into a famous tussle with Oswald on Canal Street that led to some local press attention since they were both arrested. After this, Bringuier debated Oswald on a local radio show with host Bill Stuckey. Aided by the contacts of their friend and mentor Ed Butler, the two cohorts ambushed Oswald with information about his defection to the Soviet Union. This helped compromise his local chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, of which he was the only member. Bringuier issued more than one press release after the debate. (Morley p. 174) But even more significant is the fact that Bringuier and the DRE recycled the story and the releases right after President Kennedy’s assassination. As Morley notes, this got front-page placement in major newspapers throughout the land. (p. 207) And so the legend of the alienated Cuban and Soviet sympathizer now began to take hold with the public. And this was used by the Warren Commission to somehow explain Oswald’s motivation for allegedly killing Kennedy.

    This New Orleans aspect is linked to Oswald’s strange and legendary trip to Mexico, where Scott was the CIA station chief at the time. So by telling the story of the DRE, he links it to the story of Scott’s job of surveying the Cuban and Russian embassies in Mexico City. Morley is then able to show us what the Warren Commission did with this material. So the book becomes not just a biography of Scott, but an opportunity to show how the CIA and the Warren Commission handled the alleged commie sympathizer in the months leading up to the murder of JFK. And afterwards. Morley is a skilled enough writer, about at the level of David Talbot. So he manages to cobble this together in an adroit and manageable way. The book is never really profound or moving. But it’s never dull or cumbersome either.

    II

    A little bit more than the first third of the book deals with the life and early career of Winston Scott. Scott was not a Boston Brahmin like Ben Bradlee or Des Fitzgerald. Nor was he a born member of the Eastern Establishment/CFR crowd like Allen Dulles or Jock Whitney. He was born in Alabama in 1909 near the Escatawpa River. The “house” was made up of discarded railroad boxcars. His hometown of Jemison was northwest of Mobile. Hid father worked for the railroad and the Scotts lived right next to the tracks where Morgan Scott toiled. (p. 15) During the week Win Scott and his siblings trekked three miles to school in the town of Brookwood. And like most southern families they went to church every Sunday. An early indication of Scott’s romanticism and his desire to escape these humble circumstances occurred at age 13. He and two friends decided to run away to New Orleans. The objective was to catch a freighter to France and join the French Foreign Legion. They were stopped on their journey by a friendly policeman who made a phone call and they were returned home.

    Scott won a scholarship to attend college in Birmingham. There he met his first wife Besse Tate who he impulsively married by making his father awaken a Justice of the Peace at four in the morning. Win Scott had a head for numbers so he first became a math instructor at the University of Alabama. A paper he did on the algebraic possibilities of disguising message codes caught the attention of J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover sent one of his envoys to recruit him and Scott joined the FBI in 1941. He was first stationed in Pittsburgh and then Cleveland.

    In 1944, Scott began the journey that would eventually lead to the CIA, Oswald, and Mexico City. He decided to switch over to the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency. While in Europe, he met the youngest OSS Chief of Station, a man named Jim Angleton who worked out of Italy. After the war, both OSS officers were befriended in Washington by British intelligence agent Kim Philby. Morley notes that Scott eventually suspected that Philby was a Russian double agent. Future counter intelligence chief Angleton did not. And this may have led to the eventual paranoia about CIA infiltration by the KGB, which later plagued Angleton and ended in his eventual forced resignation by Director Bill Colby.

    Along with Allen Dulles, Scot campaigned to create the Central Intelligence Agency and to grant it the power to sanction covert operations. So when the CIA was eventually established and Dulles became Deputy Director, he brought his friend and ally Win Scott into the agency that he would now stamp indelibly with his own imprint. Although Scott was not actually part of the overthrow of the Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954, he was familiar with the players involved including an officer on the rise, one David Phillips. Through his friendship with Allen Dulles, Scott asked the Director for a job outside the United States. He wanted to be station chief in Mexico City. Dulles obliged him and Scott began his thirteen-year tenure there in 1956.

    It is here that Morley introduces the figure of Anne Goodpasture (p. 83). Goodpasture is an ubiquitous character in that she has clear but rather undefined ties to Scott, Angleton, and Phillips. Like Scott she was born in the south, in her case, Tennessee. Like Scott, she served in the OSS during the war, except she was stationed in the Far East with people like Dick Helms and Howard Hunt. After the war, she moved to Washington where she came to the attention of Angleton. And this is where I have my first complaint about the book. Goodpasture is a most fascinating character. And Morley interviewed her for two days in 2005. (See page 305) Either he does not find her very intriguing, or he took most everything she said at face value. John Newman, Ed Lopez, Dan Hardway, Lisa Pease and myself disagree. Lopez and Hardway – under the supervision of Mike Goldsmith – wrote the absolutely excellent Mexico City Report for the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Now Goodpasture was supposed to be working for and under Winston Scott in Mexico City. When the Mexico City Report – sometimes called the Lopez Report – was first declassified by the Assassination Records Review Board, I interviewed Lopez at his home in Rochester, New York. Since this was the first time I had seen the woman’s name repeatedly emphasized, I asked Lopez who she was. Surprisingly, he said that “She worked for Phillips when he got stationed down there … she handled all his projects for him.” (Emphasis added.) When I asked Ed what Phillips was doing there, he said, “He had some bullshit title, but he was in charge of almost all the Cuban operations from there at the time.” He then expanded on this by saying that since Phillips was constantly traveling from Washington to JM/Wave in Miami and to Mexico City, Goodpasture was the officer who guided his operations emanating from Mexico in his absence. In and of itself, this is extraordinarily interesting. It would make her a front tier figure in any book on the Kennedy assassination that focuses on both Mexico City and Phillips. Which this book does. But there is even more to the woman. It was Angleton who sent her to Mexico City on a counter-intelligence case. And he never lost touch with her. She worked on the famous CI case of Rudolf Abel in New York City. (The Assassinations, p. 174) Abel was convicted in 1957, and exchanged for Gary Powers in 1962. So the ties to Angleton were ongoing. In fact, Angleton stated that she was always in on the most sensitive cases. (Ibid) Further, she worked on Staff D. This was one of the most secret and clandestine operational units within the CIA. It dealt with both coups and assassination attempts.

    Now Goodpasture is a clever operator of course. So, like many operators she pleads that she was only downstairs playing the piano at the time. She wasn’t aware there was a bordello operating on the second floor. To Jeremy Gunn and the ARRB she said she was only a secretary for Staff D. She duplicated papers and copied materials. The problem with that is the fact that Angleton also said that Goodpasture was “very close” to Bill Harvey. Harvey was part of Staff D and one of the major players in the CIA plots to kill Castro under Richard Helms. (Ibid) And when Goodpasture received a career achievement award, it was on the recommendation of David Phillips. He cited her for having discovered Oswald at the Cuban Embassy. A citation rich in irony of course, since it did nothing to help prevent the murder of President Kennedy. (Ibid)

    Almost all of this, and more, is missing from Morley’s book. Goodpasture comes off as essentially a loyal civil servant who writes interesting reports about the history of the Mexico City station. Her ties to Phillips are hardly mentioned. Her connections to Angleton and his huge and powerful CI division are basically minimized.

    III

    This sets the stage for the ascension to power of John F. Kennedy. In this part of the book, I had another problem with the presentation. And it began fairly early. In regards to the Bay of Pigs, Morley writes that Kennedy had no objections to the plan. (p. 108) In Peter Kornbluh’s Bay of Pigs Declassified, the author briefly notes how Kennedy changed both the proposed landing site and the air support offered to the exiles. (Kornbluh, p. 8) Kornbluh writes that several CIA officials noted that Kennedy’s decisions severely hurt the operation’s chances for success. Two of them went to project coordinator Dick Bissell and offered to resign since they decided Kennedy’s limitations almost guaranteed its failure. Bissell assured them it would not and their concerns would be met. When the attack failed the two officials decided they had been misled, along with President Kennedy. (Ibid)

    A few pages later, Morley uses Kennedy’s famous quote about splintering the CIA into a thousand pieces after the debacle of the Bay of Pigs. (p. 112) He then adds, “He was just venting.” Oh, really. Consider Kennedy’s actions in the wake of the Bay of Pigs debacle:

    1. Appointed the Taylor Commission, an executive inquiry into exactly why the operation failed. His representative on the committee was RFK.
    2. Signed NSAM’s 55, 56, 57. These were all aimed at forcing the Pentagon into giving him more and better advice over covert paramilitary operations. And they took away responsibility for planning overt paramilitary operations from the Agency. As John Newman writes about them, they were “the first significant chink in the CIA’s covert armor since its creation.” (JFK and Vietnam, p. 99)
    3. Created an alternative intelligence apparatus called the DIA.
    4. Sent out a memorandum stating that the ambassador in a foreign country, and not the CIA, should have ultimate control over American policy in that nation.
    5. When the Taylor Commission results were submitted, Kennedy fired CIA Director Allen Dulles, Deputy Director Charles Cabell, and Director of Plans, Bissell. This clearly put the onus for the failure on the CIA. This result was quite natural since Kennedy and his brother became convinced through the inquiry that the three fired officers had deliberately misled JFK about the plan.
    6. As David Corn notes in his book on Ted Shackley, Kennedy now moved his brother into a supervisory role over many covert operations.

    As many commentators have noted, Kennedy was actually trying to exercise some degree of control over an Agency that had not really had any since its inception. Morley, I believe, downplays this aspect. And this plays into another characteristic of the book which I will note later.

    Complementing this curious and curtailed view of JFK is his even more curious treatment of Richard Helms. I can only term the substance of Morley’s portrayal of the new Director of Plans as exalted. The portrait of Helms that comes through is essentially that of a conscientious bureaucrat who has been through it all, knows the ins and outs of the political world and is a kind of fatherly figure to the Kennedys (especially RFK). This, of course, has always been the sales image that Helms has tried to convey to the public. And it was clearly evident in his autobiography of 2003, which Morley uses to a surprising degree. The problem with accepting this public view of Helms at face value is that it contrasts with the private view that, unfortunately, some reliable people have seen close up. For instance, in my aforementioned interview with Ed Lopez, he asked me if I had seen the movie A Few Good Men. Mildly surprised at what I thought was a non-sequitir, I said that I had. He said, “Remember the scene near the end with Jack Nicholson on the stand? Him screaming, “You can’t handle the truth!” I said yes. He replied, “That was Richard Helms with us in executive session. He was laughing at us, sneering at us, shoving it in our face. He had no respect for anything. To him, we were a joke.” Reportedly, when Helms emerged from that session and reporters asked him more questions about Oswald he replied, “Your questions are as stupid as the committee’s” In filmed testimony, when Chris Dodd pressed him on the CIA’s barbaric treatment of Russian defector Yuri Nosenko, Helms response was, “Well, we could put them up at the Hilton.” This is the man who, in his private writings on the JFK case, Richard Case Nagell has nicknamed “Dirty Dick.” (See Probe, Vol. 3 No. 1)

    Furthering this view, when I interviewed former CIA agent Carl McNabb before he died, he showed me a file from his days at JM/Wave. In his personal notes was a notation, “Zap Man”. I asked him what that meant. He said that one of the officers told him this was the term given to Helm’s private assassin. So I think that foot soldiers inside the Agency might have a bit of disagreement with the picture of Dick Helms that emerges here.

    Given Morley’s slant, it was not surprising to me that he could write: “Helms also had to indulge Bobby’s demands for a plan to assassinate Castro.” (p. 159) This is the kind of sentence that could be written by Helms’ official biographer, the tendentious and shameless Thomas Powers. (Who, incidentally, wrote a blurb on the back of the book.) This completely ignores both the findings of the Church Committee, and the detailed information in the CIA’s own Inspector General Report. Which was overseen by Helms himself. These plots began in the Eisenhower administration and they continued into the Johnson administration. They were deliberately kept from the Kennedys. And RFK found out about them by accident. When he did find out about them, according to his calendar, he called Helms into his office. When questioned about this meeting, Helms conveniently contracted selective amnesia. He couldn’t recall a thing about it. (For an overview of this matter, see The Assassinations pgs. 327-329) But RFK aide John Siegenthaler did recall RFK’s response to Helms and John McCone when he found out. He told them he thought it was disgraceful and had to be stopped. (Ronald Goldfarb, Perfect Villains, Imperfect Heroes p. 273)

    To be charitable to Morley, whenever one is doing a biography of a CIA officer, this kind of imbalance tends to be a problem. The reason being is that one has to consult books about these people. The books tend to be authorized, therefore sanitized. For further example, Morley uses the official biography of Allen Dulles, Peter Grose’s all too kind volume Gentleman Spy. The reason this is done is that the alternative, a really painstaking, unauthorized view of these men takes time, money, and entails dangers. Donald Gibson recalls talking to an author who tried to do such a book about Dulles. It was never published. Gibson asked him why it was not. He said, “Do you want to hear about a big conspiracy?” The other problem involved is the fact that higher-level officers or managers will not go on the record with anything not complementary to the official story. It is difficult to find those willing to talk candidly about failures, coups, assassinations, blackmail, drug-running etc. Morley does not really navigate this problem very well.

    IV

    The best part of the book deals with Oswald’s alleged visits to the Cuban consulate and Russian Embassy in Mexico City in the fall of 1963. This section of the work owes itself to the disclosures of the ARRB. More specifically to the Lopez Report and to John Newman’s important book Oswald and the CIA.

    Morley does a decent enough job in setting the stage for this crucial episode by detailing the policy towards Cuba in late 1962 and 1963. He goes through Operation Northwooods, the Pentagon plan to create a phony provocation to launch an invasion, and how JFK turned it down. He then details some of the disputes between the Kennedys and the CIA over what should be done with Cuba. People in the Agency, like Nestor Sanchez, wanted more action. The Kennedys did not. He tries to explain this by saying perhaps the Kennedys were “just using the agency and its personnel for cover as they edged toward coexistence with Castro.” (p. 158) This seems to be what JFK was doing. But its not made clear to the reader because, in another curious lacunae, Morley never mentions JFK’s back channel diplomacy with Cuba through people like Lisa Howard, William Attwood, and Jean Daniel.

    With this backdrop, Morley outlines the four secret programs through which Oswald had to come into contact with the CIA in 1963. They were codenamed AMSPELL, LIERODE, LIENVOY, and LIEMPTY. The first two programs were run by Phillips, the last two by Scott. AMSPELL was the name given inside the CIA to the DRE. So it would seem obvious that there would be documents about this interaction forwarded to either Joannides or Phillips. But as Morley notes, there are 17 months of reports–from 12/62 to 4/64– the CIA has yet to declassify on AMSPELL. (Elsewhere on this site, you can read about his struggle with the CIA to get these documents.) LIERODE refers to the camera surveillance on the Cuban consulate in Mexico City. LIENVOY refers to the wiretapping of phone lines at the Soviet Embassy, and LIEMPTY to the photo surveillance of that embassy.

    Besides the seventeen months of missing reports, the results of the other three programs are also either lacking or questionable. As many know, to this day, the CIA has yet to produce a photograph of Oswald either entering or leaving either compound. And the photo they turned over to the Warren Commission in this regard does not even resemble Oswald. (In the Lopez Report-which is scathing about her–Anne Goodpasture tries to state that she did not realize this grievous error about the wrong photo of Oswald. until 1976. The authors make it clear that they find this suggestion not credible, as they do much of her testimony.) Since Oswald frequented the compounds a total of five times, there were ten opportunities to photograph him. What happened, and why there has never been a picture produced, is one of the great mysteries of this case. The CIA has taken decades of criticism and suspicion about Oswald’s visit to Mexico City, and much of it is based on these missing photographs. It has led some people to believe that perhaps Oswald did not actually go to Mexico City, or an imposter actually made the visits. Or both. Morley tries to forward the argument that maybe there actually was a picture. He does this by quoting the testimony of Daniel Watson and Joe Piccolo in the Lopez Report. These two CIA officers related that they had either seen or heard of a photo of Oswald in Mexico City. But in the case of Watson, the witness said it was a shot from behind, “basically an ear and back shot.” And he qualified it by saying he thought it was of Oswald. The implication being the angle made it hard to be positive. (Lopez Report, p. 97) The case of Piccolo was similar. The shot was from behind at an angle. Someone in the Agency had shown it to him saying it was Oswald. When the HSCA found this man, he said he did not ever recall having such a photo of Oswald. (Ibid pgs 103-106)

    Further, the Lopez Report states that the investigators interviewed many CIA officers who were stationed in Mexico City, or worked at Langley in support of the Mexico City operation. They all stated that “the station had not obtained a photograph of Oswald from the photo surveillance operations in Mexico City.” (Ibid, p. 108) On top of that, the report adds that the investigators could not find any evidence of a photo of Oswald being sent to Langley from Mexico City at the time. (Ibid, p. 109) If one reads the report closely, the only testimony that is unequivocal about the CIA having a photo of Oswald at the time he was there is that of Winston Scott. He could not be cross-examined since he died in 1971. But what makes this fact so interesting is three things. First, Watson testified that Scott was capable of “phonying a photo if asked to produce one. I never believed Win Scott the first time he told me something.” (Ibid, p. 99) Second, that right after Scott died, James Angleton flew to Mexico City and told his widow in no uncertain terms that he wanted the contents of Scott’s safe. It was there that Scott was supposed to have stashed the photos and the tapes of Oswald in Mexico City. Angleton had been tipped of to the safe’s contents by Goodpasture. Angleton’s trip and his theft of the evidence were authorized by Richard Helms. (Morley, p. 286) Finally, Clark Anderson, the FBI legal attachÈ in Mexico City once referred to the Oswald photos as “deep snow stuff”. (Probe, Vol. 4 No. 2, p. 28) So, if the photos were fakes, that fact could never be exposed since Scott took them to his grave. Angleton snatched them up and all of Angleton’s JFK files were destroyed when he left the CIA in late 1974. (Morley, p. 201)

    The fate of the tapes of Oswald’s alleged phone calls is also part of this huge enigma. On page 117 of the Lopez Report, the authors list at least nine calls the CIA should have taped. (They also write that there may have been one or two more.) But in looking at this list, and then reading some descriptions of the calls as related to the translators who heard them, two immediate problems arise. According to the Warren Commission witnesses, Oswald spoke fluent Russian. But the voice on some of the calls is described as speaking broken Russian, or barely decipherable Russian. Second, on over half the calls, the caller speaks in Spanish. But as the authors of the Lopez Report note, the weight of the evidence says Oswald could not speak Spanish. (Lopez Report, p. 119) Morley discusses these language issues, albeit briefly, and adds one of his own. Incredibly, the Warren Commission never interviewed Silvia Duran who talked to Oswald at the Cuban consulate. There was a call made from the Cuban consulate to the Russian Embassy on a Saturday. Yet Duran always said that after his Friday visit, Oswald never came back to their consulate. So who made that call? ( Ibid p. 236)

    There are two other points about this absolutely crucial episode that Morley mentions, although not at length. First is the delay in getting the first cable to CIA HQ about Oswald visiting the Soviet Embassy. This took over a week. It has never been adequately explained. (When I asked Lopez about this strange delay, he replied: “Jim, they were using Pony Express.”) Second, the famous memo of October 10th sent to Win Scott by Langley concerning Oswald. This memo states that it contains the latest HQ information on Oswald. It did not. Morley writes that the memo was meant to keep Scott in the dark about Oswald’s recent past. (Morley p. 192) Morley also notes how many CIA staffers at HQ signed off on the false memo, and how some of them had to have known it was false since the CIA had newer information about Oswald and the DRE and the FPCC in its hands at the time. Jane Roman, one of the staffers who signed the false memo stated that its treatment indicated they had a keen interest in the subject of the memo. Roman then added that this interest was being “held very closely on the need-to-know basis.” (Ibid p. 197) She also agreed that the interest was probably operational. This fact may also explain why the cable had to go so high in the hierarchy to be sent. It went all the way up to Tom Karamessines. Who was Helms’ deputy at the time. Everyone Morley interviewed about this particular issue thought that was odd–except the co-author of Helms’ autobiography. Did the cable keep on getting kicked upstairs because people like Roman knew it was false? And then did Helms OK its dispatch through his Deputy without having to place his name on it?

    Strangely, though Morley does a good job with this memo, he completely ignores a fact directly related to it that is probably just as important. The CIA prepared two cables at this time. One that was extremely different than this one. This second memo had even less information on Oswald and it actually gave a false description of him. This particular memo went to the rest of the intelligence agencies. (Lopez Report pgs 145-146) When one sees the two cables side by side, the effect is jarring. It is hard not to conclude that certain people inside the CIA did not want to alert anyone else that Oswald was in Mexico City.

    Morley does a good enough job on the Oswald in Mexico City incident. I just wish it had been fuller and more graphic.

    V

    The last part of the book deals with the Warren Commission inquiry, Scott’s last years in Mexico City, his retirement and his death.

    As most informed students of the assassination know, the Warren Commission inquest into Oswald’s activities in Mexico City was mildly risible. The Commission sent David Slawson, Bill Coleman and Howard Willens to Mexico City. The result of their inquiry was a rather brief composition called the Slawson-Coleman report. It was declassified in 1996. I exaggerate only slightly when I state the following: comparing it to the Lopez Report is like comparing a fifth grade reader to a novel by Henry James. The trip the Commission lawyers took was arranged by Richard Helms, who thought it would be a good idea if the representatives of the Commission had a CIA case officer to escort them on their journey to Mexico. It is clear from reading the report that the trip was a set up. The three lawyers never investigated anything themselves. For instance, it was Clark Anderson who gave them the information that Oswald was allegedly at the Hotel del Comercio. Yet it took Anderson and his FBI friend several trips to find anyone there who recalled Oswald. And of the two witnesses they found, they doubted one of them. Yet Slawson accepted this. The FBI could not find a witness to a transaction for a silver bracelet that Oswald bought for his wife. They found a witness who said Oswald was at the Cuban consulate. But this witness could not identify Oswald in a photo leafleting in New Orleans. Finally, they were escorted into Scott’s company. Scott made them swear that anything he showed them had to be discussed only with the permission of his superiors at Langley. He then played them a tape of Oswald. Slawson later commented that the tape was of poor quality and he could not identify Oswald’s voice. (Probe Vol. 4 No. 1) In spite of this the Warren Commission wrote that the CIA was not aware of Oswald at the Cuban consulate until after the assassination. (See page 777) This is really all you need to know about the Warren Commission and Mexico City. Helms, who had complete control over what the Warren Commission investigation in Mexico City, seems to have got what he wanted.

    Years later, Goodpasture decided to do a complete chronology about Oswald and Mexico. After Scott read it, he decided to leave the CIA. (Morley, p. 263) His last big assignment was covering up the true circumstances of the famous student riots in Mexico City in 1968, which led to the Plaza de las Tres Culturas massacre. In 1969, Helms gave him a distinguished service award. He then retired and set up his own lucrative consulting service for those doing business with Mexico.

    Morley ends the book with some cogent comments about Angleton. He reveals that Angleton had files on the RFK assassination in his office. Including autopsy photos. This made no sense. JFK yes, but RFK? Oddly, Morley writes that a Palestinian waiter killed Robert Kennedy. (p. 282) Sirhan was never a waiter at the Ambassador Hotel. And the sentence assumes Sirhan was the actual assassin. Which jibes with the curious and unexplained statements in the book-made more than once– that Oswald shot Kennedy.

    At the very end, Morley writes that the tapes in Scott’s safe survived at least until the seventies. This is according to the testimony of CIA officer Paul Hartman. (p. 291) After Michael Scott began to request information on his dad’s manuscript, Morley suspects– from information given to Scott’s attorney– that the CIA destroyed what Hartman saw in 1987. And with it, the last and best hope anyone had in figuring from direct evidence what really happened to Oswald in Mexico City.

  • Yuri Nosenko Dies


    By Walter Pincus

    from The Washington Post

    Yuri I. Nosenko, 81, a Soviet KGB agent whose defection to the United States in 1964 and subsequent three-year harsh detention and hostile interrogation by CIA officials remains immensely controversial, died Aug. 23 under an assumed name in a Southern state, according to intelligence officials. No cause of death was reported other than “a long illness.”

    Mr. Nosenko, a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet secret police and intelligence agency, personally interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald during his time in the Soviet Union from 1959 to 1962. When Mr. Nosenko defected in 1964, he provided the first information that Oswald, the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy, was not a Soviet agent.

    Senior CIA officers at the time, including James Jesus Angleton, the agency’s counterintelligence chief, and David Murphy of the Soviet division, did not believe Mr. Nosenko was a real defector and ordered his imprisonment. Mr. Nosenko had initially made inaccurate statements about his past, and some of his information conflicted with that provided by another KGB officer, Anatoly M. Golitsin, who had defected the year before. As a result, they considered him a plant sent by Moscow to confuse Washington about Oswald.

    Richard Helms, then CIA director of operations, in 1966 ordered that a conclusion be reached in the Nosenko case. In 1967, after passing multiple polygraphs, Mr. Nosenko was released and in 1969 he was found to be a legitimate defector. He subsequently became a consultant to the agency, given a new identity and provided a home in an undisclosed location in the South.

    Last month several senior CIA officials visited him and presented him with a ceremonial flag and a letter from CIA Director Michael Hayden honoring his service to the United States, a senior intelligence official said yesterday.

    First word of his death came yesterday from Pete Earley, an author of books on the CIA who had been trying for four years to get an interview with Mr. Nosenko. Earley said Mr. Nosenko was bothered by a book released last year called Spy Wars, written by Tennent H. Bagley, a key CIA player in Mr. Nosenko’s defection and arrest. The book continued to argue that Mr. Nosenko was not a bona fide defector, but in fact was sent to cover up the KGB’s influence over Oswald.

    “I was fascinated by Nosenko because in spite of the horrific things that the agency and government did to him — the torture and mental deprivation — in the only public speech that he ever gave at the CIA, he praised the United States as being the world’s best hope for humanity, condemned Communism and Moscow, and said he never regretted his defection nor held a grudge against the officials who had persecuted him,” Earley said.

    During his incarceration, at Camp Perry, the CIA facility in Virginia, the agency kept Mr. Nosenko in solitary confinement in a small concrete cell. He often endured treatment involving body searches, verbal taunts, revolting food and denial of such basics as toothpaste and reading materials.

    Last year, the International Spy Museum in Washington canceled a session during which Bagley was to speak, allegedly because CIA officials objected to having the Nosenko issue raised.

    In his 1992 book Molehunt, author David Wise wrote, “The ‘war of defectors,’ the conflict over Golitsin and Mr. Nosenko . . . split the Agency into two camps, creating scars that had yet to heal decades later.”

    Claire George, a former CIA deputy director of operations who worked in the Soviet division at the time of Mr. Nosenko’s defection, said yesterday that the handling of Mr. Nosenko “was a terrible mistake.” But George added, “You can’t be in the spy business without making mistakes.”

    Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko was born in 1927, in Nikolayev, a Ukrainian town on the Black Sea.

    His father, a naval engineer, rose to minister for shipbuilding under Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, while his mother arranged for private tutors to school Mr. Nosenko in classical Western literature from Virgil to Voltaire. He developed an attraction to western culture. Mr. Nosenko served three years in naval intelligence after his 1950 graduation from the State Institute of International Relations in Moscow. He then became a leader within the KGB’s Soviet internal security division.

    According to Tom Mangold’s Cold Warrior (1991), a book about Angleton, Mr. Nosenko’s KGB career specialized in following U.S. agents posted in the Soviet Union and in recruiting turncoats from foreign intelligence services. Mangold’s book said he also oversaw blackmail operations. Mangold asserted Mr. Nosenko eventually grew angered by what he considered hypocrisies of the Soviet system and signaled to U.S. intelligence agents his wish to defect on ideological grounds. He made his first successful contact with U.S. intelligence in 1962, pleading desperation after squandering KGB funds on alcohol. He asked for $200 to repay the money. He later admitted this was a fabrication, and his request later raised doubts within the CIA about his intentions. Would he really sell out his country for $200?

    But his propensity to drink was not a lie, and he was fully loaded when he met CIA officials in Geneva, where he was accompanying a diplomatic mission. He revealed key information about Soviet moles working in the embassies of Western nations as well as Russian intelligence methods. According to Mangold, he pinpointed 52 microphones planted inside the U.S. embassy in Moscow and how the Soviets avoided detection of the listening devices.

    But his most stunning revelations were about Oswald, notably how the Soviet agency felt Oswald was too unstable mentally to be of much service.

    None of this saved Mr. Nosenko from a bitter fate. Golitsin stoked Angleton’s increasing paranoia about double agents in the CIA and the veracity of defectors, and Mr. Nosenko soon began his 1,277 days in custody.

    After Mr. Nosenko’s rehabilitation, he looked up the disgraced Angleton’s number in the phone book in 1975 to confront him.

    It was a brief and fruitless exchange, with Mr. Nosenko rising in his passions and Angelton cool and adamant about his judgment.

    “I have nothing more to say to you,” Angelton said.

    “And Mr. Angelton,” replied Mr. Nosenko, “I have nothing further to say to you.”

  • Update: Beware the Douglas, Janney, Simkin Silver Bullets

    Update: Beware the Douglas, Janney, Simkin Silver Bullets


    Predictably, this article created quite a buzz on John Simkin’s web site. Several members of his forum saw it and privately e-mailed him about it. He then posted the entire article/review on a thread in his forum. It created a mild ruckus, especially since I mentioned one of the habitual posters there — Peter Lemkin — and spent even more space on Mr. Simkin. The remarks by three people are worth replying to.

    1. About as convincingly as Claude Rains in Casablanca, Lemkin was shocked by what I wrote about him. He tried to imply that somehow I got some of the Russell/Lemkin story wrong. He also tried to imply that this was a deep dark secret and that I was invading his privacy and unjustly attacking him. Concerning the first, all the details were noted as right out of Cyril Wecht’s book. So if I got anything wrong, his beef is not with me but with Dr. Wecht. And if anything is significantly wrong then he should get a retraction from Wecht. Secondly, Cause of Death was published many, many years ago. And since Wecht is a celebrity author, tens of thousands of people bought it. So I find it very hard to believe that Lemkin, and many others in the research community, did not know about it. And indeed, I know for a fact that Peter is being disingenuous on this point. Because when the book was published, members of CTKA confronted him with the quotations. He then wrote an outraged letter to Dr. Wecht protesting, not the details, but the fact Wecht had written about them. Third, Dr. Wecht mentioned the episode at the Dallas ASK Conference the following year. This was in front of hundreds of people. And Lemkin was at that conference! So for him to somehow feign a lack of knowledge on this point, or that I was somehow attacking him personally, is just completely unjustified. Can no one now talk about the Roscoe White fiasco, or name the people at that ill-fated press conference? Of course not. It was a matter of public record. As is Wecht’s book.
    2. Charles Drago issued a comment that I thought was unintentionally humorous. The modest and very illustrious Drago opined that, as a writer, I had previously shown little skill. (Drago/Pascal actually called my ability in this regard “third-rate”.) He went on from there to deduce that since this particular essay was well-written, and since there was some trouble with censorship on the Simkin forum, that perhaps someone else had actually written my piece to attack that site. I can assure Mr. Drago that no one else but me wrote that essay. He can check this out with Bill Davy and Lisa Pease, who saw the preliminary draft. And considering my writings over the years, and even in that essay, his not-so-subtle implication — that the CIA put me up to it — is so goofy as to be laughable. Especially since, from my knowledge of the field, Langley is probably not all that worried about what goes on over there. Further, I will gladly match any research essay I ever wrote for Probe with anything Drago has ever done in regards to writing quality, insight, and relevant information.
    3. Simkin’s numerous responses were quite interesting. (I should note here that a couple of his members e-mailed me privately and told me they taken aback by his strong reaction, since they thought it was a good essay.) First of all, he actually defended David Heymann against my attacks on his Kennedy books. He tried to say that if the guy had faked interviews, no one in America would take him seriously anymore or publish his works. He also tried to imply there was some question about this practice.

    First of all, the fact Heymann has done this is beyond dispute. My article is hyper-linked to other sources that prove this. I myself demonstrated at least two instances in which this had to have happened. Simkin somehow missed, or deliberately ignored, all this. Secondly, the idea that this would somehow eliminate Heymann from being published or make him some kind of castoff is preposterous. Everyone in this field — except Simkin– knows that any author who writes a hatchet job on the Kennedys gets welcomed with open arms into the publishing world. And their work is never questioned. Which is how Heymann gets away with it. This of course is because the political/economic milieu today favors the practice. Harris Wofford in his book Of Kennedy and Kings wrote about this phenomenon. Publishing houses asked him to add some dirt to the book or they wouldn’t publish it. I wrote a long two-part essay on the subject called The Posthumous Assassination of John F. Kennedy. (The Assassinations, pgs 324-373) Heymann’s work fits right in with this. In fact, I would not be surprised if he chose this particular path to regain entry after being investigated and fleeing the country due to his problems with the Barbara Hutton book. Another recent example of this trashy genre is Burton Hersh’s godawful piece of tripe, Bobby and J. Edgar. This volume is just as bad as Heymann’s horrors, and actually seems inspired by Heymann and Gus Russo.

    Further, Simkin tried to distance himself from Heymann by saying he had not read his two books on the Kennedys. I find this hard to believe since he had excerpted part of the book on RFK on his site. It was an excerpt, which I mentioned in the essay: Jim Garrison allegedly calling RFK in 1964 to talk about his brother’s assassination. As I showed, this anecdote had to be fabricated since Garrison was not investigating the case at that time. Evidently, Simkin missed this fact. Or maybe not.

    But let us move on to Simkin and Mary Meyer. On the thread he created, Simkin tried to say that accusing him of having Bill O’Reilly type intensity on the subject and/or trying to smack down anyone who disagrees with him was unfounded and not exemplified. Well, how about this for an example? When Ron Williams posted my review of Brothers on Simkin’s site, it began to attract a lot of attention. And people began to excerpt and praise my whole critique about Talbot’s section on Meyer. Which Simkin had lobbied him to include. This criticism from his own flock apparently was too much for Simkin. He went and fished out a previous thread on Meyer that was buried about four pages back of the front page. He reinserted it onto the front page, right next to Williams’ thread about my review. He then began to use that thread to attack what I had written about Talbot. He eventually brought in Peter Janney and they both began going at me. Need more examples? In the past, when someone posted my comments about why Tim Leary is not credible on Meyer, Simkin then posted previous attacks on me by the likes of Gus Russo and Dale Myers and inserted them below my bio. He had been alerted to these by Tim Gratz, a ringer on his site who pushes the work of Russo. This would be like attacking a conspiracy researcher — which Simkin is supposed to be — with the likes of Hugh Aynesworth and Edward Epstein. But Simkin is so obsessed with Meyer he did not see the irony in it. When people complained about this, he said he had removed them. But he really had not. He had just moved them from being under my name to being under Russo’s name.

    But let’s get to the Meyer case itself, specifically Ray Crump. This is the man who was apprehended about 500 feet from the towpath murder scene on October 12, 1964. Crump was apprehended by the police in a clearing area near a culvert that dropped into the Potomac River. He was soaking wet, with a bit of weed on him, torn pants, and a bloody hand and head. (Nina Burleigh, A Very Private Woman, pgs 233-34) As he was walked back toward the crime scene, one of the witnesses identified him as the man standing over Meyer’s body. (Ibid.) When asked what he was doing there, Crump said he was fishing. But his fishing pole was found in a closet at home. Since it is difficult to go fishing without a pole, he later changed his story to having a date with a prostitute. (Ibid, p. 244) This also made his excuse for his bloody hand — he cut it on a fishhook — less than credible. (Ibid. p. 265) Later when his discarded torn jacket and tossed cap were found, he began weeping uncontrollably and saying, “Looks like you got a stacked deck.” (Ibid. p. 234)

    Prior to the Meyer murder, Crump had had a drinking problem and had been jailed because of it. In 1963 he did time for petit larceny. His drinking problems and a head injury caused him extreme headaches, and even blackouts. When intoxicated he had been violent toward the women in his life. (Ibid, p. 243)

    Prior to Burleigh’s book no one knew about this aspect of Crump’s personality. Also, no one had done much work on Crump’s trial. Crump was quite fortunate in that he secured the services of a very good attorney with a razor sharp legal mind, Dovey Roundtree. Like Crump, Roundtree was African-American. And from Burleigh’s book it is hard not to conclude that this is one of the reasons she took the case. From Burleigh’s description of the trial, it is pretty clear that she outlawyered and outprepared the prosecutor, Allan Hantman, who clearly underestimated her. For instance, Roundtree harped on a discrepancy by one of the witnesses who identified the assailant as being 5′ 8″ tall. Crump was 5’6″. Hantman was so unprepared for this that he never countered it until his summation to the jury. And then he had to be prompted by journalists in the courtroom who realized it could allow Crump, who they felt was guilty, to walk. The rather small discrepancy was explained by the shoes Crump wore the day of the murder. They had two-inch heels. (Burleigh, p. 271) But it was too late. The jury acquitted Crump. (I should add here, that when one notes the fact that there were ten blacks and two whites on the jury, Simkin accuses one of racism. Like somehow this does not matter at all. )

    Later in life, Roundtree’s notes on the trial were shipped to Columbia University Law School where her tactics and strategy were taught to law students. (Ibid p. 275) But even she was later forced to admit, her defendant did get into a “little trouble” afterwards. The bright and adroit lawyer said that was really not her concern. She blamed Crump’s later criminally violent behavior on the stress of the trial. As if there were no signs of it before. But one can see why Roundtree would want to minimize and rationalize Crump’s later record. For it strongly suggests she helped a guilty man go free.

    After he walked, Crump went on to be arrested 22 times. The most recurrent charges were arson and assault with a deadly weapon. (Ibid p. 278) His first wife left him before the trial. She fled the Washington area, went into hiding, and in 1998 Burleigh could not find her. She was so eager to be rid of her husband that she left their children with his mother. (Ibid. 278- 279) Crump remarried. And what he did next could explain his first wife’s escape from the scene. In 1974 he doused his home with gasoline. With his family inside. He then set it afire. While out on probation, he assaulted a police officer. In 1972 he pointed a gun at his wife. She injured herself fleeing the home. From 1972-79, Crump was charged with assault, grand larceny and arson. His second wife left him.

    In 1978 he set fire to an apartment building where his new girlfriend was living. Previously he had threatened to murder her. Several months later he took the 17-year-old daughter of a friend on a shopping tour in Arlington. Afterwards he took her to an apartment. There he raped her. Tried on the previous arson charge, he spent four years in jail. (Ibid. p. 280)

    When he got out in 1983, he set fire to a neighbor’s automobile. He was jailed again. He got out in 1989 and married his third wife in North Carolina. While living there he had a dispute over money with an auto mechanic. Crump tossed a gasoline bomb into the man’s house. He was jailed again. (Ibid. p. 280) In the face of all this, it is not at all surprising that when Burleigh wanted to interview him about the Meyer case, he refused the opportunity to praise or defend the verdict. After her investigation of the man and his trial, Burleigh is now convinced to a 90% certainty that Crump committed the crime.

    Simkin and Janney never mention the above. In fact, they actually compare Crump with Oswald! This is incredible. The Warren Commission tried to present Oswald as a lonely and violent sociopath. But as independent investigators delved into his background, they learned this was not true. This was a cover story to disguise the fact he was an intelligence operative. The opposite is true with Crump. The more one delves into his character, the more one begins to understand he actually is a violent sociopath! Except unlike Oswald with the Warren Commission, he had the services of a first rate lawyer at his inquest.

    Let me conclude with another way Janney and Simkin try to create unwarranted intrigue about Crump. When Simkin started spouting all this stuff about the “true” killer actually being a CIA hit man stalking Mary etc etc. I began to think that they must have turned one of the witnesses into this mythological killer. And in fact, I later discovered this is what they had done. How was I able to predict this in advance? Easy. There is no other suspect! So they had to create this out of necessity.

    In my original essay and in my review of Brothers, I showed in great detail that the witnesses that Simkin and Janney advised David Talbot to use — Leary, James Angleton, Heymann, and James Truitt — were, to put it mildly, lacking in credibility. With the above research on Crump and his trial by Burleigh, what is there left to the Meyer case? And let me stress here again, I actually used to believe this legerdemain. Not anymore. I don’t like being snookered. Especially by the likes of James Angleton and Timothy Leary.

    And neither should you.

  • Beware: The Douglas/Janney/Simkin Silver Bullets

    Beware: The Douglas/Janney/Simkin Silver Bullets


    One of the reasons I do not post on JFK forums anymore is due to an experience I had on Rich Della Rosa’s site, JFK Research.com. One of my pet peeves about the JFK field is the spreading of disinformation disguised as insider dope that is meant to “solve the case”. After posting at Rich’s site for a few weeks, I began to do a series on the book Farewell America, which — as I shall explain later — I have come to believe falls into this category. I also posted about a similar fatuous tome, The Torbitt Document. I was surprised at the reaction. I learned the hard way that some people have a difficult time accepting the fact that other authors or investigators could have less than honorable goals. One poster said that by criticizing Farewell America I was defiling Fletcher Prouty’s name, since he liked that book. It got so heated that, although I liked Rich personally, I decided to sign off. I have not been back.

    I don’t think my vigilance about this subject is unwarranted. There have been several of these slick — and not so slick — poseurs who have attempted to supply both the research community and the public a silver bullet in the JFK case: a theatrical deus ex machina, which would finally and magically explain the events of 11/22/63. For example, the late Joe West was involved in two of them: Ricky White’s late discovered treasure trove/footlocker and James Files’ taped “confession”. Another example: at the first ASK Conference in Dallas, a panel of “authorities” attempted to explain who the three tramps really were — and how one of them was a killer who had previously murdered his family.

    Perhaps the most memorable silver bullet is detailed in the first chapter of Cyril Wecht’s 1993 book, Cause of Death. In 1988 a man named Robert Russell got into contact with the eminent pathologist after seeing him discuss the JFK case with Dan Rather. He was a convict turned mob informant who was in a California prison. He began a long correspondence with Wecht and in 1990 sent him a letter in which he linked himself to Jimmy Hoffa. He wrote Wecht that he had access to evidence in the JFK case, namely the JFK autopsy materials: negatives, photos, x-rays, blood and tissue slides — and also Kennedy’s long lost brain. (Wecht, pgs. 48-50)

    Wecht asked Russell for more details. Russell obliged by saying that in 1967 he met a woman who knew an associate of Jack Ruby’s named Ralph Paul. The woman, whose name was Cindy, claimed that on the day of Kennedy’s murder, she drove Paul to the parking lot behind the grassy knoll. Paul carried a violin case. When he returned to the car, they proceeded to an apartment where they met both Jack Ruby and a Secret Service agent. After the two others departed, Cindy looked inside the violin case and found a rifle, ten bullets, a map of the motorcade route, and a check for a hundred grand made out to Ruby. Cindy said she stashed the evidence in a container and drove to New Orleans, which is where Russell met her. While living with the woman, Russell discovered these items, which were hidden in a small room.

    Since it was RFK who had been hunting down Hoffa, Russell got in contact with him. Bobby told him to keep the evidence hidden and secret. Russell learned through RFK that Kennedy had taken the autopsy materials to a small church in upstate New York. Kennedy told the residing priest that if anything should happen to him he should call Russell and give the evidence to him. When RFK was killed in 1968, this is what happened. Wecht had reservations about this part of the story. As he writes, why would RFK “confide all this to a low-life snitch?” (p. 67) Sensing the impending doubt, Russell sent Wecht a home movie on VHS. Filmed in a swampland that looked like Louisiana or Florida, it showed Russell digging up one of the rifles used in the assassination that he had gotten from Cindy. At this point, and after Russell had asked for a loan, Wecht terminated the correspondence.

    But Russell got in contact with others in the JFK research community who were more easily convinced. One was Peter Lemkin. Lemkin talked to Wecht about Russell and asked him if he would at least examine the swampland rifles. Why? Because Lemkin actually paid the ex-convict a hundred thousand dollars for the two rifles. Wecht relates in his book (pgs. 68-69) how Lemkin sadly wrote to him in December of 1991: Russell had turned out to be a fraud and he had lost a fortune in the scam. When Wecht got in contact with Russell’s parole officer, he said, “We traced the guns and found out he bought them from a pawnshop just last year…” Wecht concludes the Russell section of his book by saying that people like Russell are one reason the JFK case may never be solved: “They are true wackos who are not interested in truth or justice, but are greedy con men … ” who “muddy the waters”.

    I agree. This is why I did what I did with Farewell America and the Torbitt Document. To remind people that you have to be on your guard about such things. Especially because the phenomenon has spread to related areas, like the Lex Cusack hoax that Seymour Hersh, and others, fell for concerning Marilyn Monroe. Cusack grossed seven million on that bit of forgery. Or the phony fables of the late Judith Exner, which she sold to People Weekly and Vanity Fair for six figures.

    Another one of these related areas I had written about was Mary Meyer. And I thought that because of the essay I had done on her (The Assassinations. pgs 338-345), plus the work Nina Burleigh did on her murder, that the controversy swirling around the deceased woman would finally quiet down. But then David Talbot’s book came out. When I read it, I noted that he had a few pages on the JFK/Mary Meyer episode. And he used people who I thought I had discredited, like Timothy Leary. And also the notoriously unreliable David Heymann — who I will have more to say about later. There was another JFK book of recent vintage that discussed the Mary Meyer case. And the more I found out about why Talbot had used this material, the more curious I got about this other book. But to explain why, I have to go back in time to describe how I first met Kristina Borjesson.

    II

    Kristina Borjesson is one of the true heroines of contemporary journalism. A veteran and award-winning producer for both CNN and CBS, she was assigned to report on the famous and mysterious 1996 explosion of TWA 800. It was this career altering experience that forms the basis of her intriguing book Into the Buzzsaw (2002). The book is a collection of essays dealing with the problems mainstream media has in telling the truth about sensitive and controversial stories. I met Kristina in 2003. The Assassinations had just come out, and coincidentally we happened to have the same book publicist. As we were going to a gathering in Brentwood on a Sunday afternoon, she asked me about a web site called TBR News. I said I had not heard of it. She said the man who runs it, a guy named Walter Storch, had displayed some of the famous Fox News memos. If the reader recalls, in 2003 a Fox insider had released some company memos showing how higher-ups at the network told staffers how to slant stories. Storch said he had original copies of these memos. Kristina asked to see them. And she e-mailed him that request. He then called her and they discussed the memos. But Kristina told me that there was just something about him that did not inspire confidence in her — something calculating and cagey. So she did not give him her address. But Storch did recommend to her a book he had been involved with. It was about the John Kennedy assassination. The title was Regicide. Kristina asked around about it and she told me there was something weird about Storch’s involvement with the book. Namely, his name is not on it or in it.

    Kristina is correct. The billed author of Regicide is a man named Gregory Douglas. The book was released in 2002. At the time it was published, it was actually highly acclaimed by some in the research community e.g. Jim Fetzer. The subtitle of the book is “The Official Assassination of John F. Kennedy.” Why is it called that? Because it purports to reveal the actual conspirators in the assassination and how they worked together to pull it off. There are four main parts of the book: 1.) A Soviet Intelligence Study of the JFK assassination 2.) A DIA analysis of the Soviet Study called The Driscoll Report (title based upon the actual author of the analysis) 3.) Interpolated commentary by Gregory Douglas 4.) The Zipper Documents.

    The most sensational part of the book is the last. These documents are supposed to be a record of actual meetings held by the conspirators from March to November of 1963. It was quite an extensive meeting. If one believes Douglas, the plot encompassed the CIA, FBI, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lyndon Johnson, the American Mafia, Corsican hit men, and the Mossad. Talk about a grand conspiracy. And these were all involved before the actual assassination. So we are not just talking about the cover up. The grand master of the conspiracy is allegedly James Angleton, counter-intelligence chief of the CIA. If you know anything about Angleton, you realize how strained the Zipper documentation part of the book is. To believe that someone as secretive as Angleton would recruit all these people into the plot, and then keep an official record of it goes against everything we know about him. But according to Douglas, that is precisely what happened. Angleton kept a log of all meetings he had with his co-conspirators. The log is organized by date, time, and subject matter. And the log is not just of actual meetings. Even the phone calls Angleton made in furtherance of the plot are recorded. For instance, on April 10, 1963 Angleton’s assistant called Sam Giancana about the Mafia Don’s payments in aid of the plot. On October 24th, there was a phone call between Angleton and Giancana about the arrival of the Corsican assassins in Montreal. Angleton even included dates and times when he got reports from Sam Cummings of Interarmco on weaponry to be used in the shooting.

    Besides the incredible thesis, there are other problems with this careless creation. For instance, Lyman Lemnitzer is listed as still being a member of the Joint Chiefs in April of 1963 (p. 92). He was not. Kennedy had replaced him with Maxwell Taylor several months before. If Hoover and the FBI were kept fully informed of the plot, then why was the FBI Director so puzzled by the Oswald machinations going on in Mexico City? To the point where, shortly after the assassination, he told President Johnson that there seemed to be an imposter for Oswald in Mexico. About the Mexico City episode, Douglas can actually write, “In point of fact, it matters not what Oswald did while in Mexico because this trip had no possible bearing on the allegations of assassination heaped onto a dead Oswald.” (p. 99) In light of what we know today, this is incredible. It is clear now that Mexico City was meant to cinch the “Oswald in league with the Communists” angle of the conspiracy. That Johnson and Hoover a.) Did not buy it, and b.) Did not like it — since it risked a war with either Russia or Cuba. And as commentators like John Newman have noted, this is where the fallback position of Oswald as the warped sociopath entered the scenario. And this is what the Warren Commission ended up running with. Just on the above grounds, the book seems a dubious concoction.

    But there is more. The book says that “one of the assassins, the man who fired at Kennedy from nearly point blank range … “. (p. 100) Who can this possibly be referring to? With the present copies of the Zapruder film, it is obvious that no one fired at Kennedy from anywhere near point blank range. According to Douglas, Oswald actually told the Russians he was an intelligence agent and gave them documents purloined by the ONI from the CIA (p. 173). Douglas also knows about documents that show the FBI paid Oswald as an informant. (p. 174) These are documents that no researcher has ever seen. In his description of the DIA analysis of the Soviet report, he has the DIA saying that there were three shots fired that day. And that all three hit either JFK or John Connally, thereby ignoring the hit to James Tague (pgs. 28-29). Yet, the Tague hit was something even the Warren Report was forced to admit. In another howler, Douglas has the Bay of Pigs invasion occurring in April of 1962! In the book’s index, the middle name of Allen Dulles is listed incorrectly as “Welch”, instead of “Welsh”. The book also says that the reason that the Russians moved missiles into Cuba was that they found out about the assassination plots against Castro. (This makes absolutely no sense. Talk about killing a mosquito with an elephant gun.)

    I could go on and on. But the point is made. The book is almost certainly a fabrication. But there is another angle running through the concoction that needs to be pointed out: Its reliance on what I have called elsewhere the posthumous assassination of President Kennedy. That is, the attempt to blacken his character and therefore his historical image. This explains why Regicide names only five Kennedy books in the acknowledgements section. And two of them have nothing to do with the actual murder of JFK. But they have a lot to do with his posthumous assassination. They are Thomas Reeves’ A Question of Character, and Sy Hersh’s infamous and atrocious The Dark Side of Camelot. Early in the book, this angle is clearly pronounced: ” … it was the personality, actions, and family background of John Kennedy that led to his death.” (p. 67) In other words, Kennedy’s assassination was not really an extension of politics by other means: a veto by assassination. Kennedy’s fault was in himself. He egged it on by his irresponsible acts in office. In short, this book tries to blame the victim. In more than one way.

    First, Angleton arranges the whole grand conspiracy because he believes that Kennedy and his brother are giving away state secrets to the Soviets. This is clearly based on the famous Anatoly Golitsyn inspired “mole hunt” conducted by Angleton. The problem with Douglas using this is that it did not start until September of 1963. Which is six months too late for the conspiracy timetable laid out in Regicide. Further, the Russian defector Golitsyn actually met with Bobby Kennedy in 1962. He gave no hint at the time that RFK or his brother was in league with the Soviets. (See Cold Warrior by Tom Mangold, p. 88) Finally, when Golitsyn did make the allegations about a mole, he placed him inside the CIA’s Soviet Division. Not in the White House. (Ibid, p. 108).

    Second, the Zipper documents are supposed to contain professionally done pictures of Kennedy and his adulterous conquests. (p. 83) The CIA got hold of these photos and they were included in the file. And President Kennedy was aware “that a number of these pictures were in Soviet hands … ” The Soviet report also says that Kennedy was a “heavy user of illegal narcotics.” (p. 178) In no book on the Cold War have I ever read anything like this. (Douglas appears to have borrowed the latter charge from the Mary Meyer tale. A point I will refer to later.)

    Third, consistent with the Hersh/Reeves revisionism, Douglas goes after Joseph Kennedy hard. The DIA report says that Joe Kennedy was heavily involved with bootlegging during Prohibition and had been involved with the Capone mob in Chicago. Kennedy and Capone had a falling out over a hijacked liquor shipment. Capone had threatened Kennedy’s life over this and Joe Kennedy had to “pay off the Mob to nullify a murder contract” on himself. (p. 59) Further, RFK started his attack on the Mob at his father’s request to revenge himself for this (p. 60) Need I add that Douglas bases this fantastic charge on Chicago police records that no one but him has seen.

    So not only does the book seem to be an invention, it is also an invention with a not so hidden revisionist agenda. That traitor and libertine Kennedy got what he deserved.

    III

    As I said earlier, one of the things Kristina Borjesson was puzzled about was that Storch was pushing a book that his name was not on or in. That is not really puzzling. Because it appears that Storch is actually Douglas. Another pseudonym for Douglas is Peter Stahl. And this is where the story gets quite interesting. For it appears that, if anyone in the JFK community would have done any digging into the person, they would have found that Douglas/Stahl/Storch has spent a lifetime as a confidence man. He has been reported by some as counterfeiting such exotic items of art as Rodin statuettes. Another of his specialties seems to be faking documents about the Third Reich, which sometimes relate to the Holocaust. In fact, he wrote a four-volume set on Hitler’s Gestapo Chief Heinrich Muller. Some believe the entire set is highly dubious. In fact, a group of people Douglas/Stahl has long been associated with are the Holocaust revisionists at Institute of Historical Review. They are so familiar with him and his past antics that one of them has set up a site detailing many of them. It makes quite an interesting read. And it is a puzzle to me how someone like Fetzer, who originally bought into Regicide — and actually talked to Douglas/Stahl — never found out about his past. (To his credit, Fetzer later reversed his opinion of the book and called it a likely hoax.)

    One of the reasons Douglas was associated with these people is that he had a prior association with Willis Carto. Carto will be familiar to those who have read Mark Lane’s book Plausible Denial (1991). Carto ran a small media conglomerate called the Liberty Lobby for a number of years. But there was a split in the ranks and the dissidents founded the IHR, while Carto’s main publication was The Barnes Review. This is important because the TRB in TRB News, stands for The Barnes Review. As one commentator has noted about the site, although its archives contain some Holocaust revisionist material, a lot of the other stuff comes off as anti-Bush liberalism. But here is the problem. A lot of the material appears to be about as genuine as Regicide. Further, as that book was aimed at a target audience, and the Muller book also appeared aimed at a target audience, some of the “stories” on the site seem aimed at the growing resentment towards President Bush. To the point of making up false stories which are picked up by legitimate outlets but are later discredited. For instance, there was a story there saying that the Pentagon is grossly underreporting the number of casualties in Iraq. The story’s by-line was by one Brian Harring who was supposed to have found a PDF file with the real numbers on them. And this story then spread to places like the liberal Huffington Post. Well, there is a Brian Harring, but as one can see by reading this entry (scroll down to the section entitled “Riots in the Streets”), he had nothing to do with this story and it appears that Stahl/Douglas is using his name against his will.

    I could continue in this vein , but the point is that not only does Stahl/Storch/Douglas partake in what seem to be fraudulent books and stories, but — like a classic confidence man — he seems to aim them at certain audiences he knows will be predisposed to accept them. The latter stories I mentioned seem to be targeted at left/liberal sites in order to fool and then discredit them by the eventual exposure of false information. To stretch a parallel, in intelligence realms, this concept is called “blowback”.

    IV

    What gave Douglas/Stahl/Storch the impetus to write Regicide at the time he did? And what made him think anyone would take it seriously? The apparent pretext for the book is billed on the cover. It says the “documentation” for the work comes from files “compiled by Robert T. Crowley, former Assistant Deputy Director for Clandestine Operations of the CIA.” There was such a person. He passed away in the year 2000. Douglas says that, although he never met him in the flesh, he talked to him many times. And when he died, Crowley went ahead and gave him many documents he had. In the appendix to the book, Douglas inserts a very long list of “intelligence sources” he found in the Crowley papers, which he says was “most likely compiled in the mid-1990’s” (p. 125) The alphabetical list goes on for over forty pages and lists addresses and zip codes. How and why the CIA would list addresses and zip codes in its documents is a question Douglas never addresses. And for good reason. Daniel Brandt of Namebase looked at the list and came to the conclusion that it is almost entirely composed of the publicly available member list of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers.

    The other problem with the alleged “documentation” is even worse. Crowley worked in a small circle of friends which included William Corson, James Angleton, and journalist Joe Trento. When the news got out in 2002 about Regicide being based on files left behind by Crowley, Trento did a double take. How could Douglas be in possession of the Crowley files when Crowley had given those files to him? Further, Trento had published a book in 2001, The Secret History of the CIA, which was largely based on his longtime association with Crowley. And, unlike the long distance telephone relationship Douglas alleged, Trento’s was an in-person relationship. Further, the content of Trento’s book, based on interviews and materials given him by that trio, was also different — especially on the Kennedy assassination. (In that book, Angleton clings to his cover story of Oswald as a Russian agent.) When I called Trento to ask him why Crowley would give his files to two different writers, he replied quite strongly that Douglas was “A complete liar.” And he didn’t “have anything”. (Interview with Trento, 8/14/07)

    So it would appear that Regicide is a concoction from A-Z. But before leaving it, I would like to point out something that struck me as odd about Douglas’ commentary in the book. As many know, there have been several strange and untimely deaths related to the Kennedy assassination. I agree that some people have exaggerated the number of these, but still there are more than several that will not go away. Douglas had the entire spectrum to choose from in this regard. I found his choice rather weird. On pages 100-101 of his confection, he quotes from the DIA Report, “The hit team was flown away in an aircraft piloted by a CIA contract pilot named David Ferrie from New Orleans. They subsequently vanished without a trace. Rumors of the survival of one of the team are persistent but not proven.” Right after this juicily phrased quote, Douglas writes that there was another murder “that bears directly on the Kennedy assassination.” He could have picked from over a dozen documented cases. A few that I find particularly interesting are Gary Underhill, David Ferrie, Eladio Del Valle, John Roselli, Sam Giancana, George DeMohrenschildt, and William Sullivan. Douglas picked none of them. He chose Mary Meyer. And then he writes almost two action-packed and lurid pages about her death. Including this: Crowley saw her mythological diary. It contained “references to her connection with Kennedy, the use of drugs at White House sex parties, and some very bitter comments about the role of her former husband’s agency in the death of her lover the year before.”

    And this is not the only place Storch/Douglas pushes the “mystery” about Meyer.

    V

    There is someone else who is relentlessly pushing the Meyer-as-mysterious-death story. Jon Simkin runs a web site with a JFK forum on it. It is hard to figure out his basic ideas about President Kennedy’s assassination. But if you look at some of his longer and more esoteric posts, they seem to suggest some vast, polyglot Grand Conspiracy. He calls it the Suite 8F Group — which resembles the Texas based “Committee” from Farewell America. And when he discusses it, he actually uses the Torbitt Document as a reference. In a long post he made on 1/28/05 (4:51 PM) he offers an interpretation of Operation Mockingbird that can only be called bizarre. He actually tries to say that people like Frank Wisner, Joe Alsop, and Paul Nitze (who he calls members of the Georgetown Crowd), were both intellectuals and lefties who thought that — get this — FDR did not go far enough with his New Deal policies. (One step further, and the USA would have been a socialist country.) At another point, he writes ” … the Georgetown Group were idealists who really believed in freedom and democracy.” This is right after he has described their work in the brutal Guatemala coup of 1954, which featured the famous CIA “death lists”. He then says that Eisenhower had been a “great disappointment” to them. This is the man who made “Mr. Georgetown” i.e. Allen Dulles the CIA director and gave him a blank check, and his brother John Foster Dulles Sec. of State and allowed him to advocate things like brinksmanship and rollback. He then claims that JFK, not Nixon, was the Georgetown Crowd’s candidate in 1960. Allegedly, this is based on his foreign policy and his anti-communism. Kennedy is the man who warned against helping French colonialism in Algeria in 1957. Who said — in 1954 — that the French could never win in Vietnam, and we should not aid them. Who railed against a concept that the Dulles brothers advocated, that is using atomic weapons to bail out the French at Dien Bien Phu. (Kennedy actually called this idea an act of lunacy). The notion is even more ridiculous when one considers the fact that, according to Howard Hunt, Nixon was the Action Officer in the White House for the CIA’s next big covert operation: the Cuban exile invasion of Cuba. Which Kennedy aborted to their great dismay. Further, if Kennedy was the Georgetown Crowd’s candidate for years, why did the CIA put together a dossier analysis, including a psychological profile of JFK, after he was elected? As Jim Garrison writes, “Its purpose … was to predict the likely positions Kennedy would take if particular sets of conditions arose.” (On the Trail of the Assassins, p. 60) Yet, according to Simkin, they already knew that. That’s why they backed him. At the end of this breathtaking post, he advocates for a Suite 8F Group and Georgetown Crowd Grand Conspiracy (i.e. somewhat like Torbitt), or a lower level CIA plot with people like Dave Morales, Howard Hunt, and Rip Robertson (a rogue operation). Mockingbird was unleashed on 11/22/63 not because the CIA was involved in the assassination — oh no — but to cover up for the Georgetown/Suite 8F guys, or a renegade type conspiracy.

    When I reviewed David Talbot’s book Brothers, I criticized his section on Mary Meyer. Someone posted a link to my review on Simkin’s forum. Simkin went after my critique of Talbot’s Meyer section tooth and nail. (I should add here that Simkin has a long history of doing this. He goes after people who disagree with him on Meyer with a Bill O’Reilly type intensity. Almost as if he is trying to beat down any further public disagreement about his view of what happened to her.) In my review I simply stated that Talbot had taken at face value people who did not deserve to be trusted. And I specifically named Timothy Leary, James Truitt, James Angleton, and David Heymann. And I was quite clear about why they were not credible. At this time, I was not aware of an important fact: it was Simkin who had lobbied Talbot to place the Mary Meyer stuff in the book. Further, that he got Talbot in contact with a guy who he was also about to use to counter me. His name is Peter Janney.

    Janney has been trying to get a screenplay made on the Meyer case for a while. He advocates the work of the late Leo Damore. Damore was working on a book about Meyer at the time of his death by self-inflicted gunshot wound. Janney says he has recovered a lot of the research notes and manuscripts that Damore left behind. Damore had previously written a book about Ted Kennedy and Chappaquiddick called Senatorial Privelege. That book used a collection of highly dubious means to paint Kennedy in the worst light. For instance, Damore misquoted the law to try and imply that the judge at the inquest was covering up for Kennedy. He used Kennedy’s cousin Joe Gargan as a self-serving witness against him, even though Gargan had had a bitter falling out with the senator over an unrelated matter. He concocted a half-baked theory about an air pocket in the car to make it look like the victim survived for hours after the crash. This idea was discredited at length by author James Lange in Chappaquiddick: The Real Story (pgs. 82-89) In other words, Damore went out of his way to depict Kennedy’s behavior as not just being under the influence, or even manslaughter, but tantamount to murder. The book’s combination of extreme indictment with specious prosecutorial brief resulted in its ultimate rejection by its original publisher, Random House. They demanded their $150, 000 advance back. When Damore refused, the publisher sued. The judge in the case decided that, contrary to rumor, there were no extenuating circumstances: that is, the Kennedy family exerted no pressure. He ruled the publisher had acted in good faith in rejecting the manuscript. (In addition to the above, it was well over a thousand pages long. See NY Times 11/5/87) There were also charges that the author had practiced checkbook journalism. But Damore then picked up an interesting (and suitable) book agent: former political espionage operative and current rightwing hack Lucianna Goldberg. The nutty and fanatical Goldberg has made a career out of targeting progressives with any influence e.g. George McGovern, Bill Clinton, the Kennedys. So she made sure Damore’s dubious inquiry got printed. And sure enough, Goldberg got that rightwing sausage factory Regnery to publish Senatorial Privelege.

    Damore’s book on Meyer appeared to be headed in a similar direction. In a brief mention in the New York Post Damore said, “She [Meyer] had access to the highest levels. She was involved in illegal drug activity. What do you think it would do to the beatification of Kennedy if this woman said, “It wasn’t Camelot, it was Caligula’s court.” If you are not familiar with ancient Roman history, Caligula was the demented emperor who, among other things, seduced his sister, slept with a horse, and later made the horse a senator. Which sounds made to order for Goldberg and Regnery. I can just see the split picture cover: JFK and Meyer on one side with Caligula and his horse on the other.

    In his research, Damore interviewed drug guru Tim Leary and apparently believed everything he told him. As I noted in my review of Brothers, for specific reasons, Leary is simply not credible on this subject. But the fact that Damore was going to use him would connote he had an agenda. For instance, in the new biography of Leary by Robert Greenfield, the author concludes that Leary fabricated the whole story about Meyer getting LSD from him to give to JFK in order to spice up the sales for his 1983 book Flashbacks. Which is the first time Leary mentioned it in 21 years, even though he had many opportunities to do so previously. Further, Greenfield notes that Leary made up other stories for that book, like having an affair with Marilyn Monroe, in order to make it more marketable for his press agent. And he told the agent to use the Meyer/Kennedy story to get him more exposure. Leary understood that sex, drugs, and a dead Kennedy sells. Apparently, so did Damore.

    VI

    As I said, Peter Janney entered the picture after Damore died. His father had worked for the CIA, and he had been friends with Michael Meyer, a son of Mary and her husband, Cord Meyer. He has in recent years put together Damore’s research and is now marketing s script called Lost Light based on Meyer’s life and death. From what I have read about it, it should be a real doozy, right up there with Robert Slatzer’s Marilyn and Me. In addition to promoting it in his book Regicide, Douglas/Storch has also pushed it on his web site, TBR News. In fact, there seems to be a kind of strange symbiosis between the two. For instance, when Trento contested Douglas ever having Crowley’s files, Douglas accused Trento of trying to cover up the “Zipper documents”. A post of April 2, 2007 by (the disputed) “Brian Harring” said that Trento and a “Washington fix-lawyer” actually burned the original documents. But somehow, Janney “discovered the original Zipper file and began the lengthy and time-consuming process of authentication.” Which, as I have proved above, would be impossible. Asked about this rather bizarre statement, Storch/Douglas backtracked by saying that Janney had uncovered similar evidence and documents in his inquiry. Whether this is all true or not — and with Douglas you never know — I find it interesting that Douglas finds Janney’s efforts bracing and attractive.

    What Janney is postulating makes the ersatz claims of Tim Leary look staid and conservative. According to him, Mary Meyer had more influence in the Kennedy administration than Hilary Clinton had in her husband’s. Various histories of the Kennedy administration will have to be revised and/or rewritten. According to Janney, Mary was such a powerful force guiding Kennedy that presidential aides feared her because of her influence with him. According to Janney/Damore, Kennedy was so smitten with her that he was going to divorce Jackie after he left office and marry his LSD lovechild guru. (Since Judith Exner also peddled this tale, Kennedy’s agenda after the White House was pretty busy.)

    What were some of the things Mary’s acid love had guided JFK to? Well, apparently we were all wrong about Kennedy’s ultimate disenchantment with Operation Mongoose and the subsequent role of Lisa Howard and others in the Castro back channel of 1963. Mary will have to be written into future versions of how that all started. And no, it was not the nightmare experience of the Missile Crisis that provoked Kennedy into the Soviet hotline and the 1963 test ban treaty. Somehow, historians missed Meyer’s role in all that. Ditto for the American University speech. Plus poor John Newman will now have to revise JFK and Vietnam per Mary’s role in the withdrawal plan. And finally — drum roll please — there is what Janney calls “the crown jewel of American intelligence”: space aliens and UFO’s. Yep. Kennedy was aware of the Pentagon’s suppression of proof we had been visited by alien civilizations. And Kennedy — guided by Mary the Muse — wanted to tell the entire world about it. (Leary on acid would have never dreamt that one up.)

    But this is only a warm-up for Janney/Simkin/Damore. The actual circumstances surrounding her death are even more fantastic. Here it begins to resemble Ricky White’s long lost “foot locker” story. If you don’t recall, in the White affair a late discovered journal revealed that Ricky’s father Roscoe, a Dallas policeman in 1963, did not just shoot JFK. He was also part of a hit squad to eliminate a list of dangerous witnesses who could blow the lid off the Warren Report. (For a summary of the White debacle, see “I was Mandarin” at the Texas Monthly Archives.) Well, if you buy Simkin and Janney, Mary was killed as part of a planned and precise execution plot that was lucky enough to have a nearby fall guy in hand. Since she was one of those dangerous witnesses, the hit team had been monitoring Mary for months and knew her jogging routine. A man and woman walking her path that day were not really a couple. They were actually spotters to let the actual assassin know she was coming. This all comes from an alleged call Damore got from one William Mitchell — except that is not his real name. He was really a CIA hit man with multiple identities. He spilled this all out to Damore after Damore wrote him a letter at his last known address. Which according to the tale was really a CIA safe house. (Why a CIA safe house would forward a letter from a writer to an assassin is not explained.) Damore told all this to a lawyer who made notes on it. Later, Damore killed himself. And no one can find Mitchell because of his multiple identities. In other words, the guy who heard the story is dead and the guy who told the story is nowhere to be found. A jaded person might conclude that it all sounds kind of convenient.

    I should note, it is never explained why the hit man would spill his guts out to Damore thirty years after the fact. After all, Damore was just a writer. He had no legal standing to compel information. People usually do not confess to things like being the triggerman in a murder plot unless they have to. Between facing a writer researching a cold case and a lethal, living, breathing organization like the CIA, I think I would just bamboozle or hang up on the writer. Especially when the Agency can do things like tap my phone and find out if I am leaking dark Company secrets. And then dispose of me if I was. But since Simkin and Janney say this is the key to the case, we aren’t supposed to ask things like that.

    When I criticized the sourcing of Talbot’s book on the Meyer episode, Simkin commented that in two cases I was discounting the sources on insubstantial grounds. The two sources were David Heymann and James Angleton. In this day and age, I would have thought that discrediting these two men would be kind of redundant. In my review, I compared the sleazy Heymann to Kitty Kelley — which on second thought is being unfair to Kelley. To go through his two books on the Kennedys — A Woman Called Jackie, and RFK: A Candid Biography — and point out all the errors of fact and attribution, the questionable interview subjects, the haphazard sourcing, the unrelenting appetite for sleaze that emits from almost every page, and the important things he leaves out — to do all that would literally take a hundred pages. But since Simkin and Janney like him, and since Talbot sourced him, I will point out several things as a sampling of why he cannot be used or trusted.

    In the first book, Heymann writes that JFK’s messy autopsy was orchestrated by Robert Kennedy and some other members of the family. (p. 410) This has been proven wrong by too many sources to be listed here. When describing the assassination of JFK, Heymann lists three shots: two into JFK and one into Connally. Although he is kind of hazy on the issue, he leans toward the Krazy Kid Oswald scenario. He can keep to that myth since he does not tell the reader about the hit to James Tague. (p. 399) Which would mean four shots and a conspiracy. Incredibly, Heymann tries to say that when Jackie was leaning out the back of the car she really was not trying to recover parts of Kennedy’s blown out skull. What she was actually doing was trying to escape the fusillade! (p. 400) One might ask then: How did she end up with the tissue and skin, which she turned over to the doctors at Parkland? Predictably, Heymann leaves that out of his hatchet job.

    The book on RFK is more of the same. Heymann discovered something about RFK that no one else did. Between his time on Joe McCarthy’s committee and the McClellan Committee RFK moonlighted with the Bureau of Narcotics and Drugs. What did he do there? Well on their raids, he would switch from mild-mannered Dr. Jekyll to wild man Mr. Hyde. He seized bags of cocaine and distributed it among his buddies. If the drug suspects were female he would make them serve him sexually before busting them. He would watch idly as some of his cohorts threw drug runners out of windows. (p. 100) Now that he knew about drugs, when Ethel’s parents died in a plane crash, Bobby sent her to a Canadian facility in order to get LSD treatments to cure her grief. (pgs 104-105) Did you know that RFK was secretly a bisexual who both made out and shared a homosexual lover with Rudolf Nureyev? (p. 419) According to Heymann (p. 361), Jim Garrison called RFK up in 1964 to discuss his JFK assassination ideas but RFK hung up on him. (Since Garrison had stopped investigating the case by 1964, this call has to be mythological.) About RFK’s assassination, those who try and explain the many oddities that abound over the crime scene are quickly dismissed as “looking for a complex explanation to what seems a simple story.” (p. 501) Therefore, he puts terms like the Manchurian Candidate, and the girl in the polka dot dress in belittling quotes. (He actually prefaces the latter with the term “so-called”, like she doesn’t really exist in that form.) Unbelievably, Heymann mentions the name of pathologist Thomas Noguchi in regard to his case shattering work on RFK exactly once. (p. 508) And this is in a note at the bottom of the page. In other words with Heymann, Oswald shot JFK, and Sirhan killed RFK. And if they didn’t, it doesn’t really matter.

    Some of the things Heymann’s interview subjects tell him are just plain risible — to everyone except him. Jeanne Carmen was exposed years ago by Marilyn Monroe biographer Donald Spoto (see p. 472) as very likely not even knowing her. Heymann acts as if this never happened. So he lets her now expand on the dubious things she said before. Apparently she forgot to tell Anthony Summers that she herself also had an affair with JFK, “And he wasn’t even good in bed.” (p. 313) Carmen also now miraculously recalls that Bobby, Marilyn and her, actually used to go nude bathing at Malibu. (p. 314) The whole myth about Bernard Spindel wiretapping Monroe’s phone has also been exposed for years. But Heymann ignores that, and adds that it wasn’t just Spindel and Hoffa but also the FBI and CIA who were wiretapping Marilyn’s phone. The whole chapter on Monroe had me rocking in my chair with laughter. It concludes with Carmen saying that the cover up of Monroe’s murder was so extensive that the perpetrators broke into her home too! (p. 324) One of the things Heymann relies on in this Saturday Night Live chapter is an interview he says Peter Lawford gave him. Which is kind of weird. For two reasons. Apparently Lawford told him things he never told anyone else. Second, Heymann says he interviewed Lawford in 1983, which is the year before the actor died. It actually had to be that year. Why? Because Heymann’s book on Barbara Hutton came out in 1983. And there was no point in interviewing Lawford for that book. When it came out, Heymann got into trouble and was actually investigated for charges of fraud. The original publisher had to shred 58, 000 copies of the book. It got so bad Heymann fled the country to Israel and reportedly joined the Mossad. But, amid all this hurly burly he somehow was prescient enough to know that he should interview Lawford before he left since he knew he would eventually be writing about the Kennedys. And Lawford trusted this writer under suspicion with sensational disclosures he never duplicated for anyone else.

    Or did he? One of the many problems with Heymann is his very loose footnoting. Very often he quotes generic sources like “FBI files”, without naming the series number, the office of origination, or even the date on the document. So an interested reader cannot check them for accuracy. This is fortunate for Heymann, since, like with his interviews, he finds things in government files that apparently no one else has — like Secret Service agents writing about the sexual details of JFK’s affairs. In his book on Robert Kennedy, again, people say things that they have said nowhere else. He writes that in 1997 Gerald Ford admitted that, as president, he had suppressed FBI and CIA surveillance files which indicated President Kennedy was caught in a crossfire in Dealey Plaza and that John Roselli and Carlos Marcello had orchestrated it. (p. 361) In 1997 Ford was saying what he always said. That Oswald did it and there was no cover up. He did have to defend against evidence he had moved up the wound in Kennedy’s back to his neck. But during that controversy he never came close to saying what Heymann attributes to him.

    But it gets worse. Apparently either Heymann is clairvoyant, or like the boy in The Sixth Sense he is so attuned to the spirit world that he can speak with the dead. In his RFK book he of course wants to place Bobby amid the plots to kill Castro. And it would be more convincing if he actually got that information from RFK’s friends and trusted associates. So he goes to people like JFK’s lifelong pal Lem Billings and White House counselor Ken O’Donnell. Naturally, they both tell Heymann that RFK was hot to off Fidel. There is a big time sequence problem with both these interviews. Now if you look in his chapter notes, Heymann simply lists people he says he interviewed for a chapter — with no dates for the interview. This is shrewd of him. The RFK book was published in 1998. Lem Billings died in 1981. So we are to believe that while working on a book about Barbara Hutton, Heymann just happened to run into Billings and asked him about RFK and Castro. Even though Bobby Kennedy is never even mentioned in the Hutton book! Further, in Jack and Lem, a full length biography of Billings published this year, there is not even a hint of this disclosure. The O’Donnell instance is even worse. He died in 1977. At that time Heymann was working on a book about the literary Lowell family. Why on earth would he interview O’Donnell for that? Did he know that 20 years later he would be writing a book about RFK? But Heymann has been accused of faking interviews as far back as 1976 for his book on Ezra Pound. (For more evidence of Heymann’s penchant for fabrication, click here.)

    This is the author who Janney has sat and talked with many times. Whom Simkin vouched for as a source for their Mary Meyer/JFK construction. All I can say is that if I ever met Heymann, the last thing I would do is sit and talk with him. I’d leave the room. The fact that Janney and Simkin appear to be ignorant about the appalling history of this dreadful and ludicrous hack says a good deal about their work. But if they did know, and endorsed him anyway, it says a lot more.

    VII

    One of the things that Simkin uses to add intrigue to the tale is the famous Meyer “diary” story. In fact he names the number of people involved in the search for Meyer’s diary as proof that a.) It must be true and b.) The diary must have been valuable. In my essay on Meyer in The Assassinations I minutely examined this whole instance and the various shapes and forms it has taken through the years. I concluded that clearly the people involved have been lying about what happened in this Arthurian quest, and also about the result of it. This, of course, touches on the credibility of the story itself and also shows that there were splits between the parties involved. Most notably James Truitt had an early falling out with Ben Bradlee. The Angletons and Truitts stayed chummy through the years. In fact I concluded that it was Angleton who had alerted Truitt to Meyer’s death in the first place — since he was in Japan — and got him to go along with entrusting the legendary diary to him. (The Assassinations, p. 343) At that time, I wrote that no one knew what was in the diary and that if it contained what it allegedly did, Kennedy’s enemy Angleton would have found a way to get it into the press. At that time I had not read Heymann’s book on Jackie Kennedy. Although it is unadulterated trash, there is one interesting passage in it. It is an interview with James Angleton. Now, as I have warned, Heymann likes to disguise fiction as non-fiction, down to quoting dubious interviews. But this one might be genuine. Angleton died in 1987. The book was published in 1989, so the time frame is possible. Also, unlike with Billings, Lawford, and O’Donnell, the stuff he says sounds like Angleton. (Even though Heymann gets Angleton’s CIA title wrong.)

    Angleton (perhaps) says that Meyer told Leary that she and a number of Washington women had concocted a plot to “turn on” political leaders to make them more peace loving and less militaristic. Leary helped her in this mission. In July of 1962, Mary took Kennedy into one of the White House bedrooms and shared a box of six joints with him. Kennedy told her laughingly that they were having a White House conference on narcotics in a couple of weeks. Kennedy refused a fourth joint with, “Suppose the Russians drop a bomb.” He admitted to having done coke and hash thanks to Peter Lawford. Mary claimed they smoked pot two other times and took an acid trip together, during which they had sex.

    Angleton (perhaps) continues with Toni Bradlee finding the diary. But she gave it to Angleton who destroyed it at Langley. He says, “In my opinion, there was nothing to be gained by keeping it around. It was in no way meant to protect Kennedy. I had little sympathy for the president. The Bay of Pigs fiasco, which he tried to hang on the CIA and which led to the resignation of CIA Director Allen Dulles, was his own doing. I think the decision to withdraw air support of the invasion colored Kennedy’s entire career and impacted on everything that followed.” (pgs 375-376)

    Heymann says that Angleton garnered the details about the affair from Mary’s “art diary”. Yet the details are quite personal in nature, and would seemingly be out of place in a sketchbook. And again, why, if Mary had turned against the CIA, would she entrust these personal notations with Angleton, of all people? Nothing about the diary story makes any sense. But if this interview is genuine, then it would confirm my idea that the diary was apocryphal, or was actually an “art diary”, and that Angleton himself inserted the whole drug angle of the story through his friend and partner in Kennedy animus, Jim Truitt. (Truitt surfaced the drug angle in 1976 with an interview in The National Enquirer.) For Truitt, it was a twofer: he not only urinates on JFK — which he had been trying to do for over a decade — but he also gets to nail Bradlee, who had fired him. In 1976, when this all started, the revelations of the Church Committee were leading to the creation of the House Select Committee to investigate Kennedy’s murder. So it would be helpful for Angleton to get this tall tale started since he had a lot to lose if the truth about Kennedy’s death ever came out. Why?

    As John Newman has shown, Oswald’s pre-assassination 201 files were held in a special mole-hunting unit inside Angleton’s counter intelligence domain. This unit, called SIG, was the only unit Angleton had that had access to the Office of Security, which by coincidence, also held pre-assassination files on Oswald. Angleton staffer Ann Egerter once said that SIG would investigate CIA employees who were under suspicion of being security risks. (The Assassinations, pgs. 145-146). When Oswald “defects” to the Soviet Union, it just happens that Angleton is in charge of the Soviet Division within the CIA. When Oswald returns, he is befriended by George DeMohrenschildt, a man who Angleton has an intense interest in. As Lisa Pease pointed out, shortly before the assassination, Oswald’s SIG file was transferred to the Mexico City HQ desk. (Ibid, p. 173) While there, members of Angleton’s staff drafted two memos: one that describes Oswald accurately, and one that does not. The first goes to the CIA; the other goes to the State Department, FBI and Navy. Ann Goodpasture, who seems to have cooperated with David Phillips on the CIA’s charade with Oswald in Mexico City, had worked with Angleton as a CI officer.

    After the assassination, Angleton was in charge of the Agency’s part of the Warren Commission cover up. One of the things he did was to conspire with William Sullivan to conceal any evidence that Oswald was an intelligence agent. (Ibid. p. 158) He then imprisoned and tortured Soviet defector Yuri Nosenko because he stated that the Russians had no interest in Oswald, and Angleton’s cover story was that Oswald had been recruited as a Russian agent. During the Garrison investigation, the CIA set up a Garrison desk, which was helmed by Angleton’s assistant Ray Rocca. (Ibid p. 45) Garrison investigated the origins of the book Farewell America, which he came to believe was a disinformation tract. He discovered it was an off the shelf operation by an agent of Angleton. When Clay Shaw’s trial was prepping, Angleton did name traces on prospective jurors. (Ibid p. 46) When Angleton was forced out of the CIA in early 1975, he made the infamous self-exculpatory statement, “A mansion has many rooms … I was not privy to who struck John.” Many have presumed that this was a warning that, now that he was unprotected, Angleton would not take the rap for the Kennedy case alone. Especially since, at that time — in 1975 — congress was about to investigate the case seriously for the first time.

    While the HSCA was ongoing, Angleton was involved in two exceedingly interesting episodes: one that seemed to extend the cover up of his activities with Oswald, and one aimed at furthering his not so veiled threat about being a fall guy. The first concerns the creation of the book Legend by Angleton’s friend and admirer Edward Epstein. Written exactly at he time of the HSCA inquiry, this book was meant to confuse the public about who Oswald really was. If anything, it was meant to portray him as a Russian agent being controlled by DeMohrenschildt. At the same time, DeMohrenschildt was being hounded by Dutch journalist Willem Oltmans to “confess” his role in the Kennedy assassination — which he refused to do. Right after he was subpoenaed by the HSCA, DeMohrenschildt was either murdered or shot himself. The last person who saw him was reportedly Epstein. Angleton’s other suspicious action was the1978 article by Victor Marchetti about the famous “Hunt Memorandum”. This was an alleged 1966 CIA memo from Angleton to Richard Helms that said no cover story had been put in place to disguise Howard Hunt’s presence in Dallas on 11/22/63. Trento later revealed that Angleton had shown him the memo. The release of the article through former CIA officer Marchetti was meant to implicate the Office of Plans, run by Helms in 1963. Hunt worked out of that domain. This could be construed as a warning: if Angleton was going down, he was taking Helms and Hunt with him.

    Looking at the line of cover up and subterfuge above poses an obvious question: Why would one spend so much time confusing and concealing something if one was not involved in it? (Or, as Harry Truman noted in another context: How many times do you have to get knocked down before you realize who’s hitting you?) In my view, the Meyer story fits perfectly into the above framework. Angleton started it through his friend Truitt in 1976. And then either he had Leary extend it, or Leary did that on his own for pecuniary measures in 1983. Angleton meant it as a character assassination device. But now, luckily for him, Simkin and Janney extend it to the actual assassination itself: The Suite 8F Group meets Mary and the UFO’s.

    James Angleton was good at his job, much of which consisted of camouflaging the JFK assassination. He doesn’t need anyone today giving him posthumous help.

  • James Jesus Angleton and the Kennedy Assassination, Part 2


    From the September-October 2000 issue (Vol. 7 No. 6) of Probe


    Bobby knows so little about us. One night he began to talk of muffled suspicions and stifled half-certainties, and said to me, “I had my doubts about a few fellows in your agency, but I don’t anymore. I can trust John McCone and I asked him if they had killed my brother, and I asked him in a way that he couldn’t lie to me, and he said he had looked into it and they hadn’t. 

    I told that story to Hugh. You know how rarely he laughs aloud. He actually struck his thigh. “Yes,” he said, “McCone was just the man to ask.” 

    “What,” I asked him, “would you have answered?” 

    “I would have told Bobby that if the job was done properly, I would not be able to give a correct answer.” 

    – From Norman Mailer’s novel Harlot’s Ghost. (The character of Hugh Montague (Harlot) is based on James Angleton)


    The most consistently prominent players in the assassination saga continue to be James Jesus Angleton and his counterintelligence staff. They held a file on Oswald predating the assassination by at least three years. After the assassination, Angleton and his closest associate, Ray Rocca, served as the gateway between the Warren Commission and the CIA. If anyone was in a position to move Oswald around prior to the assassination and control the cover-up afterwards, it was Angleton.

    The key associates of Angleton who show up frequently in the Oswald/JFK assassination story are Raymond G. “The Rock” Rocca, Ann Egerter, Scotty Miler, and Birch O’Neal. Rocca had been with Angleton since his OSS days in Italy, and would control the Warren Commission’s relationship with the CIA. The latter three were members of the tiny CI/SIG unit. Egerter opened Oswald’s 201 file under the name “Lee Henry Oswald.” Scotty Miler controlled the watch list during the period when Oswald was placed on and taken off that list. Birch O’Neal controlled CI/SIG during the period of the building of Oswald’s strange 201 file.

    In Part I, we examined the likelihood that Oswald was directly involved with Angleton’s counterintelligence unit in the CIA. When queried about this, Anne Goodpasture, who played a role in the Mexico City aspects of Oswald’s story, did not deny a relationship between the two:

    Q: Have you had any reason to believe that…CI staff had any role in respect to Oswald prior to the assassination?

    A: I don’t know.1

    She was not asked if she had any knowledge, but if she had any “reason to believe.” If she truly had no reason to believe this, her only possible response would have been “no.” Her response indicates clearly that she does have some doubt about the matter, that she may indeed have had reason to believe this.

    Another group that shows up in a few places in the assassination story is Army intelligence. It is worth noting that, during the interim between the ending of the OSS and the formation of the CIA, Angleton served as a major in the Army and helped organize Army Intelligence’s efforts to track down German agents who were using false identity cards.2 Angleton was not one to lose a contact. Once made, he would continue to use contacts for life.

    Other CIA people who show up often in this story include David Atlee Phillips of the Western Hemisphere division, who worked with Bill Harvey and later Des Fitzgerald on Cuban operations; Win Scott and his “right-hand man” Anne Goodpasture from the Mexico City station; John Whitten (“Scelso”) of the Western Hemisphere, Division 3; Charlotte Bustos of the Mexico City desk at Headquarters; and Richard Helms and his deputy Thomas Karamessines, who play large roles in the pre- and post-assassination paper trail. We should also note that the entire Western Hemisphere was run by J. C. King, a man closely linked to Nelson Rockefeller. King himself had been involved in the CIA’s assassination plots involving Castro and Trujillo.3

    Interweaving Mexican Threads

    There are strange connections that link these various players. Shortly before the assassination, Oswald’s CI/SIG-held 201 file was transferred to the Mexico City Headquarters desk, responsible to John Whitten and supported by desk officer Charlotte Bustos. (Bustos is identified as Elsie Scaleti in the Lopez Report.4)

    Bustos, Ann Egerter of Angleton’s CI/SIG unit (the woman who opened the 201 file on “Lee Henry [sic] Oswald”), and Stephan Roll, Angleton’s CI liaison to the SR (Soviet Russia) division, drafted the two now infamous communications that cause much suspicion of the CIA’s involvement in the Kennedy assassination.5 Although the two communications were drafted at the same time, the cable to CIA in Mexico City describes Oswald as 5’10”, 165 pounds, with light brown hair; whereas the teletype to the State Department, Navy and the FBI describes Oswald as being approximately 35 years old, 6′ tall, with an athletic build and a receding hairline. Why would Angleton’s people be collaborating with the Mexico City desk officer to mislead other agencies within the government unless they were in some measure trying to hide or protect Oswald’s identity?

    Immediately following the assassination, Bustos allegedly found a photo of Oswald from the CIA’s Mexico City surveillance operations. Phil Agee, Joseph Burkholder Smith, Daniel Watson, and Joseph Piccolo, all CIA employees at some point, recalled hearing aboutóand in the latter two cases, actually viewingósuch a photo. According to Agee, Bustos found the photo within an hour or two of the President’s assassination. John Whitten said of Bustos that she had a “fantastic memory” and yet, like E. Howard Hunt, Bustos cannot recall what she was doing the day of the assassination.6 But Anne Goodpasture is the person who supplied the photo the CIA showed to the FBI as a possible picture of “Oswald”. (Curiously, Goodpasture said in an unsworn ARRB interview that headquarters refused to send a photo of Oswald to Mexico City, and she was never sure why.7 Of course we know from Oswald’s CIA file that indeed news clippings from his defection with his photo were present, so the CIA did have a photo of Oswald to share, and could also have easily obtained more had they asked the Navy or FBI.)

    If Bustos had found a photo, another question is raised. Was Bustos’ picture a true picture of Oswald? Or was it a picture of just another person who was not Oswald? If Bustos’ picture was of Oswald, for the CIA to have supplied Goodpasture’s “Mystery Man” photo in place of the real photo suggests a deliberate effort to deceive. In that case, Bustos’ picture would have to have been “disappeared” by the agency, lest the evidence of their deception come to light. And if Bustos’ picture was not Oswald but another man who looked like him, that also suggests a deliberate effort to deceive, as the picture was shown to at least two others within the CIA as evidence that Oswald had been in Mexico City, a point which has never been fully proven. To date, the CIA has taken the only safe road available, claiming (despite multiple accounts to the contrary) that no such picture was ever found.

    Anne Goodpasture told Jeremy Gunn of the ARRB that she had worked at one point during her CIA career for James Angleton as a counterintelligence officer, and that it was the CI group that sent her to Mexico City in 1957.8 Asked to explain the difference between CE (counterespionage) and CI (counterintelligence), Goodpasture replied, “Counterespionage was the activity and Counterintelligence was the product.”9

    From Mexico, Goodpasture had worked on the case of Rudolph Abel,10 a Soviet agent working in New York City and curiously, living one apartment below famed author, FPCC activist and latter-day CIA apologist Norman Mailer.11 Angleton said of Goodpasture, “I personally have had very little dealings with her but my men had had a lot of dealings with her. She was always in on very sensitive cases.”12 Goodpasture was also involved with Staff D, which was seriously involved with several coup attempts and assassination plots. To the ARRB, Goodpasture downplayed her involvement in Staff D, claiming that she was simply involved in duplicating and distributing materials.13 However, according to Angleton, Goodpasture was “very close” to Bill Harvey.14

    Goodpasture maintained that in 1963 her sole duty was to the Mexico City station and Win Scott.15 Goodpasture tells us that Win Scott was “very, very conservative. He was from Alabama and I think he was a supporter of George Wallace.”16

    Goodpasture was later to receive a career achievement award on the recommendation of David Atlee Phillips, who cited her for having discovered Oswald at the Cuban embassy. Goodpasture was responsible for delivering the “deep snow”17 photo of the Mexico “Mystery Man”. Significantly for our purposes, Goodpasture was also the liaison and in most cases, the sole point of contact, outside of Win Scott, David Phillips, and Scott’s deputy, Alan White, to the other agencies of the U.S. government regarding the Mexico City station’s CIA operations.18 And like too many others in this small cadre of CIA employees, Goodpasture has trouble remembering the moment of Kennedy’s assassination:

    I think I heard about it from a phone call from our outside person on the phone tap operation, and I believe it was around lunchtime when there weren’t too many people there and as they all filtered back in, there was office gossip, but I have tried to remember. I’ve heard so many people say I can remember, I was standing at the telephone or I was in the drugstore, or I was in church and I really don’t remember who all were there at the time. Dave Phillips said that someone from the military attaché’s office came up and told him about it and I don’t remember that….I don’t even remember him being in the station at that time.19

    According to Eddie Lopez, Goodpasture, in addition to her duties for Scott, ran all of David Phillips’ operations. When asked about Phillips’ politics, Goodpasture tells a story that remains redacted, a fact especially disturbing when one considers the whole purpose of the ARRB was to release previously classified materials, not to add to the secrets. But from the nature of the testimony around the redacted portion, we can gather that she is giving us some indication that Phillips was not the liberal he painted himself to be. The redaction ends with Goodpasture saying,

    …but there again, I hate for things like this to be published because there are 2,000 – over 2,000 books already been [sic] written. The thing that they are looking for is something of this type that they can put in the other book to come that will be just short of slander, and I feel that I shouldn’t really comment on the personalities for that reason. I don’t want my former co-workers or in Phillips’ case, his family, to think that I’m trying to project him as a personality that was a show-off or something other than the very sincere wonderful man that they feel that he is….20

    Phillips is the CIA man who most closely ties Angleton in the frequency of his appearance in the assassination story. Phillips appears to have been seen in the presence of Oswald by Antonio Veciana.21 And a “Mr. Phillips” who was running CIA operations against Cuba at a time when that was David Phillips’ job was seen by Gordon Novel in the presence of Guy Banister and Sergio Arcacha Smith, who were themselves in turn seen with Oswald. Oswald even rented an office in Banister’s building that had previously been rented by Sergio Arcacha Smith.22 When the HSCA investigators tracked down the many false “Castro did it” leads, they kept tracing back to assets run by Phillips.23 Dan Hardway, who had much documentation to support that allegation, told Gaeton Fonzi,

    I’m firmly convinced now that he ran the red herring, disinformation aspects of the plot. The thing that got him so nervous was when I started mentioning all the anti-Castro Cubans who were in reports filed with the FBI for the Warren Commission and every one of them had a tie I could trace back to him. That’s what got him very upset. He knew the whole thing could unravel.24

    Angleton was close friends with Win Scott and ran operations with him. Scott, in turn, was so close to Phillips that he recommended Phillips be his deputy in the Mexico City station while waiting for the next Deputy, Alan White, to arrive.25 Phillips, in turn, connects to JM/WAVE.26 JM/WAVE is another key component in the assassination story, because JM/WAVE trained assassins and participated in some of the plots against Castro. The line between Des FitzGerald’s Special Affairs Staff (the replacement for Harvey’s Task Force W) and the actions of JM/Wave is blurred. The weekend of the Kennedy assassination, John McCone’s executive assistant Walt Elder saw Fitzgerald, and FitzGerald told Elder he had met with Rolando Cubela. He did not tell him that he had given him a poison pen to be used against Castro, nor that he had pretended to be an emissary of Bobby Kennedy’s (Helms had told him not to worry, that he would approve that lie). No mention of assassination was made. But Elder had the distinct impression that FitzGerald was particularly upset that weekend. Evan Thomas, in his book The Very Best Men, painted the following scene:

    Elder was struck by FitzGerald’s clear discomfort. “Des was normally imperturbable, but he was very disturbed about his involvement.” The normally smooth operator was “shaking his head and wringing his hands. It was very uncharacteristic. That’s why I remember it so clearly,” Elder said in 1993. He thought FitzGerald was “distraught and overreacting.”

    Des Fitzgerald’s wife told author Evan Thomas that the first and last time she ever saw her husband break down in tears was when Oswald was shot by Jack Ruby. Her husband had been upset from the moment of the assassination, and sat silently, watching the news along with millions of others around the globe. When Jack Ruby performed his deed, Fitzgerald began to cry, and said, somewhat cryptically, “Now we’ll never know.”27 Thomas evidently thinks this has something to do with Cubela. But does it? Cubela later turned out to be a double agent. But when was that known? Was the CIA trying to provoke Castro, knowing Cubela was his agent and planning a plot with him? Was the CIA engaging in a true assassination plot, or a deception they could later refer to in Castro-did-it scenarios?

    Angleton’s Back Channel?

    If one was planning an assassination within CIA, wouldn’t it make sense to take some precautions as to what was communicated, and through what channels? We saw in Part I of this article how Bill Harvey stressed, “never use the word ‘assassination’” and that nothing should be put on paper. But some communications need to transpire nonetheless to pull an operation of that scale off. According to Anne Goodpasture, Angleton had a back channel to Mexico City, and possibly other stations as well:

    Q: Could you describe the different kinds of channels of communication that Mexico City had with CIA headquarters, and by that I mean cables, dispatches and that sort of thing, if you needóif Mexico City station needed to communicate with headquarters, what would be the different methods that could be done?

    A: Well, there would be cables, there would be dispatches, there would be intelligence reports, there would be attachments, I can’t think of anything else.

    Q: For cable communications, was there more than one channel of cables used by CIA to go to headquarters?

    A: I can’t really answer that but I think there was what they call back channel [sic], but I don’t know the details of it. There again Mr. [Alan] White [, Scott’s deputy in the Mexico City station] would be the more knowledgeable on that than I am or someone from communications.

    Q: Have you heard, for example, that CI may have had a back channel, not just in Mexico City but in other stations as well?

    A: Well, there’s gossip that I think I have seen or have heard or I don’t think I dreamed it, that they discussed things through the back channel, but I’m not sure what that was. You might checkóMr. Helms would be the person who would know.28

    So Angleton appeared to have a private channel he could use with Scott and presumably other areas around the world to communicate traffic too sensitive to be seen even by other sworn CIA operatives. And Helms knew about these.

    The rest of this article can be found in The Assassinations, edited by Jim DiEugenio and Lisa Pease.

    Notes

    1. Anne Goodpasture ARRB Deposition, December 15, 1995, p. 90.

    2. Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), p. 41.

    3. Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett, Thy Will Be Done (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), pp. 325, 348, 354, 738-740.

    4. Compare the Mexico City Report by Eddie Lopez and Dan Hardway (hereafter called the Lopez Report), p. 109, with the quote from the deposition of “Scelso”, now known to be John Whitten (hereafter known as the Whitten deposition), p. 31. In both she is described as “sort of the Major Domo of the Branch.”

    5. Bustos’ involvement is related in the Lopez Report, and Roll’s involvement is revealed in John Newman, Oswald and the CIA (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1995). Egerter’s involvement is noted in both.

    6. See “Who’s Running the Country” by Lisa Pease in the Vol. 4 No. 2 (Jan-February, 1997) issue of Probe for sourcing. The allegation and investigation of Bustos’ photo is investigated in the Lopez Report.

    7. Anne Goodpasture ARRB Interview (unsworn, not her deposition), April 23, 1998, p. 9.

    8. Goodpasture ARRB Deposition, pp. 9, 10.

    9. Goodpasture ARRB deposition, p. 12.

    10. Goodpasture ARRB deposition, p. 37.

    11. Mark Riebling, Wedge (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), p. 145-146.

    12. James Angleton HSCA deposition, October 5, 1978, p. 157.

    13. Goodpasture ARRB deposition, pp. 13, 15.

    14. Angleton HSCA deposition, p. 157.

    15. Goodpasture ARRB deposition, p. 22.

    16. Goodpasture ARRB deposition, p. 57.

    17. “Deep snow” was the term given to this photo by David Phillip’s friend, the FBI Legal AttachÈ in Mexico City, Clark Anderson. See the FBI memo from SA W. R. Heitman to SAIC, Dallas, dated 11/22/63 (released in 1994).

    18. Goodpasture ARRB Deposition, pp. 19-20.

    19. Goodpasture ARRB Deposition, p. 28.

    20. Goodpasture ARRB deposition, p. 59.

    21. See Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1993) (much of the book is devoted to this topic), and Anthony Summers, Not In Your Lifetime (New York: Marlowe & Company, 1998), pp. 370-371.

    22. Gordon Novel’s Playboy deposition.

    23. Fonzi, pp. 292-293.

    24. Fonzi, p. 293.

    25. Goodpasture ARRB deposition, p. 54.

    26. Goodpasture ARRB deposition, p. 54. Goodpasture confirmed that Phillips had liaison between Mexico City and JMWAVE.

    27. Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 308.

    28. Goodpasture ARRB deposition, pp. 39-40.

  • James Jesus Angleton and the Kennedy Assassination, Part 1


    From the July-August 2000 issue (Vol. 7 No. 5) of Probe


    “[I]f intelligence-gathering agencies are as necessary as I believe them to be, then they must repay our blind trust and acknowledge that there may always be moments in all secret organizations when tyranny manages to slip its leash. “This was one of those occasions.”1


    August 12, 1990, was a very big day for Susan Hendrickson. While looking at a cliff in South Dakota, she saw something no one else had noticed before. Where others had seen only a sheer wall of rock, she thought she saw something more special. In the wall of a cliff, she found the outline of a skeleton that proved to be of enormous importance. The skeleton this amateur paleontologist discovered now bears her name, Sue, in Chicago’s Field Museum, and is the largest and most complete skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex ever found. From an outline, Sue helped reconstruct the past.

    After a succession of ever more interesting file releases from the National Archives regarding the Kennedy assassination, it’s time we started recognizing the outline of one of the biggest skeletons in our national closet, the outline of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy. Each new release fits into one cohesive picture. And no single figure is more prominent in this outline than the man who headed the CIA’s counterintelligence unit for 25 years, James Jesus Angleton. It was in his realm that a secret, restricted file on a man named Lee Oswald was opened, long before the assassination. History professor and former intelligence analyst John Newman has deemed this curious item “the smoking file” because the lies related to it are so serious as to suggest the CIA had much to do with Oswald’s activities just prior to the assassination of President Kennedy, something the CIA has consistently denied. What was the nature of that involvement and how far did it reach? One cannot answer that without examining the near omnipresence of Angleton in all matters surrounding the assassination. Over this two-part series, we will explore how Angleton and his associates are present at every twist and turn in this case, both before the assassination and after.

    Background

    James Jesus Angleton was the son of James Hugh Angleton, an NCR executive who had once participated in General Pershing’s pursuit in Mexico of Pancho Villa, and Carmen Moreno, a Mexican woman. He grew up in Boise, Idaho and later Dayton, Ohio, where NCR was headquartered. At the age of fourteen, his family moved to Milan, Italy (where NCR manufactured cash registers). Angleton spent summers at British prep schools and Malvern College. He participated in international Boy Scout Jamboree events in Scotland, Hungary and Holland. Angleton biographer Tom Mangold indicates that when the Nazis took over the Boy Scouts in Germany, Angleton made friends with some anti-Nazi leaders and carried their letters back to the founder of the international Boy Scout movement in England. Both father and son would serve the OSS. Angleton’s father was described by Max Corvo, a top OSS officer in Italy, as “ultra-conservative, a sympathizer with Fascist officials. He certainly was not unfriendly with the Fascists.”2

    When he reached college age, Angleton attended Yale, where Angleton first showed a pension for staying up all night. Insomnia was to plague him most of his life. Although many who knew him described him as “brilliant,” Angleton’s record at Yale was undistinguished; during his junior and senior years he received two F’s and four D’s, and ended up withdrawing from another class relating to his major, English. But Angleton managed to impress teachers with his mysteriousness, his apparent maturity, and his self-assurance.

    Angleton took a serious interest in poetry and, with Reed Whittemore, co-edited the poetry magazine Furiouso, which included poems by e e cummings and Ezra Pound, among other notables. Because of his interest in this area, he was to be called by some the “Poet-Spy.”

    After graduating in the lowest 25% of his class, Angleton enrolled at Harvard Law School. According to Mangold, “Angleton’s move to Harvard was not the consequence of any strong ambition to study law. Rather, like many young men at the time, he was putting his future on hold.” During his Harvard period, Angleton met and married his wife, Cicely D’Autremont. The marriage took place a few weeks after Angleton had been drafted into the Army. Shortly thereafter, through the combined efforts of his OSS father, and his former Yale English professor Norman Pearson, then heading up the OSS Counterintelligence effort in London, Angleton was transferred to London to study Italian matters for X-2, the OSS counterintelligence component.

    It was during this period that Angleton met Kim Philby, the man who would become every counterintelligence officer’s nightmare. Philby rose to a position of great influence in the British intelligence service, until he was finally exposed as a Soviet agent and fled behind the Iron Curtain. Angleton was devastated by this, despite having been warned by Bill Harvey at an early time that Philby looked like a mole.

    In October of 1944, Angleton was transferred to Rome as commanding officer of Special Counterintelligence Unit Z, a joint American-British detachment. Less than half a year later, Angleton was made the Chief of X-2 in Italy. He was the youngest X-2 chief across OSS. His staff included Raymond G. Rocca, who would loyally serve by his side until Angleton’s ouster from the CIA in 1974.

    While he was clearly an accomplished counterintelligence expert by this time, there was another aspect which deserves mention. In his book The Real Spy World, longtime CIA officer Miles Copeland describes, through a slightly fictionalized veil in which he calls Angleton by the false nickname “Mother,” a different story. For background, SI, referenced within, was, according to Copeland, an OSS division which X-2 officers held in contempt. According to Copeland:

    In 1946, an X-2 officer known within the organization as “Mother” took a lot of information on Palestine from The New York Times; spooked it up a bit with fabricated details, places, and claims of supersecret sources; and sent it to the head of SI, Stephen Penrose, for appraisal. After studying it carefully, Penrose and his assistants decided that the material was “genuine,” that its source must be very deep inside secret Zionist and Arab terrorist groups, and that arrangements should be made for developing the sources into a regular espionage network. Mother then negotiated with Penrose for a budget, meanwhile leading the SI officers through a maze of fake names, fake background reports, and the like, and finally established that SI would be willing to pay as much as $100,000 a year out of what was left of OSS funds. Mother then confessed that the whole thing was a hoax and that the information could have been acquired for 25 cents through the purchase of five issues of The New York Times.3

    In other words, Angleton’s activities, however successful, were not limited to acts of loyalty to his fellow intelligence compatriots, but could occasionally be directed to more personal, vindictive measures. Copeland paints this as a jolly escapade. But in his footnotes, he admits that Penrose, against whom this operation was conducted, suffered a near-breakdown as a result, and was transferred to less stressful jobs. “[Penrose] and various other top people in SI (with a few conspicuous exceptions, such as Richard Helms, who defected to X-2 and went on to become the CIA’s director) were generally thought to be ëtoo Christ-like for the spy business,’ as Mother put it.”4 Copeland, by the way, was one of twenty-five OSS officers Angleton wanted to remember in his 1949 will. Others included Allen Dulles, “the operator, the patriot;” Richard Helms; and Ray Rocca.5

    After the war, Angleton did not wish to return to his new wife, nor his son, born in his absence, and chose instead to remain in action in Europe. X-2 was folded into the Strategic Services Unit (SSU), ostensibly a War Department unit and a temporary holding place for the then defunct OSS.

    Two years after the war, Angleton would return stateside to his wife and son to work for the amalgam of temporary intelligence agencies that would eventually become the CIA. There, he would achieve notoriety for his late hours, and for being, as his secretary Gloria Loomis related, “a terrible taskmaster.”6

    The SSU and other remaining intelligence units evolved over time into two separate pieces ñ the Office of Special Operations (OSO), and the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). Richard Helms served with Angleton and Rocca in the OSO. Stewart Alsop, in his book The Center, the “Prudent Professionals,” labeled the OSO people the “Prudent Professionals.” Alsop called the OPC crowd the “Bold Easterners.” The OPC included Frank Wisner, Richard Bissell, Edward Lansdale, Desmond Fitzgerald and Tracy Barnes.

    In Italy, 1947, Angleton participated in an OSO operation given to a group called SPG, or Special Procedures Group, in which propaganda and other means were used to keep the Italians from voting any Communists into office.7 Other means included the Mafia. “Wild Bill” Donovan, founder of the OSS, helped release “Lucky” Luciano and other Mafia criminals from jail in New York so they could return to Italy and provide not only contacts, but if necessary, the strong-arm tactics needed to win the war against incipient Communism in Italy. Angleton’s later reported contacts with the Mob may well stem back to this period.

    One of the groups most interested in defeating the communists in Italy was, not surprisingly, the Vatican. Angleton both gave and received intelligence to and from the Vatican. Among Angleton’s most famous agents in Italy was Mons Giovanni Montini. Montini would become famous in 1963 when he became Pope Paul VI.8 Angleton has been named as a source for funds which were used to defeat the Communists. In return, evidently, Angleton obtained access to the Ratlines the Vatican was using to move people out of Europe to safety abroad. Angleton and others from the State Department used the Ratlines to ferry Nazis to South America.9

    The OPC crowd held enormous sway in the early days of the CIA, but that changed in the wake of the spectacular failure at the Bay of Pigs. Curiously, Richard Helms and Angleton both saw their careers rise by standing on the sidelines and keeping free of all dealings related to the Bay of Pigs.

    Angleton made an interesting comment about the Bay of Pigs episode. He told the HSCA that before the Bay of Pigs, he had asked Bissell, “Do you have an escape hatch?” He asked Bissell most plainly, “In case the thing falls flat on its face is there someone who goes to Castro and says, ëyou have won the battle. What is your price?’” Angleton explained to the HSCA that he was trying to say, “have you planned for the failure as much as planned for the success?” The implication was that this was Angleton’s own modus operandi in such matters.10 We would do well to remember that statement in the context of the Kennedy assassination and cover-up.

    During the period between the end of the war and the formation of the CIA, William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the establishment lawyer who created the OSS, lobbied long and hard for a single intelligence agency to pick up where the OSS had left off, running secret operations and gathering human intelligence or “humint” in new and creative ways. In the end, although Donovan would not be a part of it, the Central Intelligence Agency or CIA was ultimately formed through the National Security Act of 1947.

    Before the CIA was created, many in Congress feared that the creation of a new intelligence agency would lead to a police state similar to the one they had just defeated in Germany, and refused to back Donovan’s efforts. But the loudest protest came from J. Edgar Hoover, who feared a direct encroachment upon the FBI’s turf. One could argue that the OSS people won because they made the better case. But there is another possibility here.

    Angleton, Hoover and Blackmail

    In Tony Summers’ book about J. Edgar Hoover, Official and Confidential, Summers showed that Meyer Lansky, a top Mob figure, had blackmail power over Hoover through possession of photos that showed Hoover and his lifelong friend and close associate Clyde Tolson together sexually. In the paperback edition of the same book, Summers introduced another figure who evidently had possession of such photos: James Angleton. If Angleton had such photos, imagine how he could have used them to force the FBI’s hand during the investigation of the Kennedy assassination.

    Summers names two sources for this allegation: former OSS officer John Weitz, and the curious Gordon Novel. Weitz claimed he had been showed the picture by the host of a dinner party in the fifties. “It was not a good picture and was clearly taken from some distance away, but it showed two men apparently engaged in homosexual activity. The host said the men were Hoover and Tolson ….” Summers added in the 1994 version, “Since first publication of this book, Weitz has revealed that his host was James Angleton.”11

    Novel’s account is even more interesting. Novel said that Angleton had shown him some photos of Hoover and Tolson in 1967, when Novel was involved in New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s case against Clay Shaw. “I asked him if they were fakes, ” Novel recounted, “but he said they were real, that they’d been taken with a special lens. They looked authentic to me ….” Novel’s explanation of why Angleton showed him the pictures is even more interesting:

    I was pursuing a lawsuit against Garrison, which Hoover wanted me to drop but which my contacts in the Johnson administration and at CIA wanted me to pursue. I’d been told I would incur Hoover’s wrath if I went ahead, but Angleton was demonstrating that Hoover was not invulnerable, that the Agency had enough power to make him come to heel. I had the impression that this was not the first time the sex pictures had been used. Angleton told me to go see Hoover and tell him I’d seen the sex photographs. Later, I went to the Mayflower Hotel and spoke to Hoover. He was with Tolson, sitting in the Rib Room. When I mentioned that I had seen the sex photographs, and that Angleton had sent me, Tolson nearly choked on his food.”12

    Now, Novel has been known to fell a few tall tales in his day. But he has on other occasions been forthcoming with interesting and sometimes self-incriminating material (such as his own participation in the Houma raid and the association between David Phillips and Guy Banister).13 Given Weitz’s corroboration, and given Angleton’s enormous power over many in high places, Novel’s account rings true. Novel added that Angleton claimed the photos had been taken around 1946.14 During the 1945-1947 timeframe, Hoover was battling hard to prevent the creation of any other intelligence organization separate from the FBI. And during this period, Angleton was involved with the Mafia in the Italian campaign. It’s certainly possible under such circumstances that Lansky or one of his associates may have shared the photos with Angleton. And the reverse case can also be considered.

    Miles Copeland adds additional credibility to this scenario in his account of this period. “Penetration begins at home,” Copeland has Angleton/”Mother” saying, “and if we can’t find out what’s going on in the offices where our future is being planned, we don’t deserve to be in business.”15 Copeland presented this scenario:

    There are several stories in the CIA’s secret annals to explain how the dispute was settled, but although they “make better history,” as Allen Dulles used to say, they are only half-truths and much less consistent with the ways of government than the true ones. Old-timers at the Agency swear that the anti-espionage people would almost certainly have won out had it not been for the fact that an Army colonel who had been assigned to the new management group charged with the job of organizing the new Agency suborned secretaries in the FBI, the State Department, and the Defense Department and organized them into an espionage network which proved not only the superiority of espionage over other forms of acquiring “humint” (i.e. intelligence on what specific human beings think and do in privacy), but the necessity for its being systemized and tightly controlled. The colonel was fired, as were the secretaries, but by that time General John Magruder, then head of the group that was organizing the CIA, had in his hands a strong argument for creating a professional espionage service and putting it under a single organization. Also, thanks to the secretaries and their Army spymaster, he had enough material to silence enemies of the new Agency – including even J. Edgar Hoover, since Magruder was among the very few top bureaucrats in Washington on whom Mr. Hoover didn’t have material for retaliation.16

    Is he saying what he appears to be saying? Copeland added, cryptically, “The success of the old SSU cadre (former OSS and future CIA officers) in perpetuating itself has been due in part to an extraordinary capacity for Byzantine intrigue ….” And in a footnote to this phrase, Copeland explains, still somewhat cryptically, “This intrigue was mainly to keep ëThe Hill’ off its back.” Copeland seems to be insinuating that more people than Hoover were blackmailed to ensure the creation and perpetuation of the CIA.

    David Wise also lends credence to such a scenario with this episode. Thomas Braden, a CIA media operative was confronted by Dulles over a remark Braden had about one of Dulles’ professional relationships. Wise recounted what followed:

    “You’d better watch out,” [Allen] Dulles warned him. “Jimmy’s got his eye on you.” Braden said he drew the obvious conclusion: James Angleton had bugged his bedroom and was picking up pillow talk between himself and his wife, Joan. But Braden said he was only mildly surprised at the incident, because Angleton was known to have bugs all over town.17

    Braden described how Angleton would enter Dulles’s office “first thing in the morning” to report the take from the overnight taps:

    “He used to delight Allen with stories of what happened at people’s dinner parties … Jim used to come into Allen’s office and Allen would say, ëHow’s the fishing? And Jim would say, ëWell, I got a few nibbles last night.’ It was all done in the guise of fishing talk.”18

    More to the point, Braden was upset because “some senator or representative might say something that might be of use to the Agency. I didn’t think that was right. I think Jim was amoral.”19 It would not be beyond belief that Angleton routinely used information gathered through clearly illegal taps to blackmail people into supporting his efforts. No wonder some of his Agency associates feared him.

    Indeed, just about everyone in the Agency who knew Angleton came to fear him and to avoid crossing his path. This extended from subordinates to some of the highest officials to serve the agency, including Allen Dulles and Richard Helms. Angleton was called “no-knock” because he had unprecedented access to senior agency officials. Said Braden,

    “He always came alone and had this aura of secrecy about him, something that made him stand out – even among other secretive CIA officers. In those days, there was a general CIA camaraderie, but Jim made himself exempt from this. He was a loner who worked alone.”20

    Angleton knew that knowledge was power, so not only would he go to extraordinary lengths to obtain such, he would also lord his knowledge over others, especially incoming CIA directors. Said one Angleton contemporary,

    “He would put each new director through the embarrassment of having to beg him to indoctrinate them in important CIA matters. Jim was enormously clever, he relished his bureaucratic power and was expert at using it. He was utterly contemptuous of the chain of command. He had a keen sense of what the traffic would bear in relation to his own interests. It worked like this: when a new director came in, Jim would stay in his own office out of sight. If a top staff meeting were requested, he simply wouldn’t attend and would offer endless delays. He was a master at waiting to see the new director alone – on his own terms and with his own agenda.”21

    Angleton’s most powerful patrons were Allen Dulles and Richard Helms. As biographer Tom Mangold described it,

    He was extended such trust by his supervisors that there was often a significant failure of executive control over his activities. The result was that his subsequent actions were performed without bureaucratic interference. The simple fact is that if Angleton wanted something done, it was done. He had the experience, the patronage, and the clout.22

    It wasn’t until William Colby, a longtime nemesis of Angleton’s, became the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) that Angleton’s power was dimmed, and eventually extinguished. But it was a long time coming.

    Angleton and the CIA

    Before examining Angleton’s relationship with Oswald, it would be useful to understand Angleton’s relationship with the CIA. Angleton ran the Counterintelligence unit. The primary role of Counterintelligence is to protect agents from a foreign intelligence organization from uncovering CIA assets and operations. Another important role is the ability to disseminate disinformation to foreign intelligence services in an effort to create for them a false picture of reality, causing them to act in ways that may be ultimately against their own interests. In other words, Counterintelligence was a unit that conducted operations, not just research. For that reason, the CI staff resided inside the Directorate of Plans (DDP) and not on the analytical side of the agency.

    In addition to owning counterintelligence, Angleton also had control over the FBI’s relationship with the Agency (he owned the liaison relationship between FBI and CIA), and sole control of the Israeli desk, which included liaison with their intelligence service, the Mossad.

    In the early days of the agency, units were given single-letter identifiers of (at least) A-D instead of names. Staff A later became Foreign Intelligence; Staff B became Operations; Staff C became Counterintelligence ; and Staff D, which dealt with NSA intercept material, among other more notorious activities, apparently was never called anything other than Staff D.23

    From the agency’s inception until 1954, Staff C was run by William Harvey, a former FBI man who was to one day be introduced to President Kennedy as “America’s James Bond.” During this same period, Staff A was run by Angleton.

    After the publication of the Doolittle Report in 195424, Staff C, which then became simply Counterintelligence, was handed to Angleton. Harvey was given the coveted Berlin station, a vortex point for operations against the USSR.

    CI/SIG and Oswald

    Angleton’s complete counterintelligence empire employed over 200 people. Inside this large group was a small handful of Angleton’s most trusted and closed-mouthed associates, called the Special Investigations Group (SIG). According to Ann Egerter, in 1959, when Oswald defected to the Soviet Union, only “about four or five” people were part of SIG, which was headed by Birch D. O’Neal. SIG members included Ann Egerter, Newton “Scotty” Miler, and very few others. Miler was, as of 1955, “either the Deputy or one of the principle officers with O’Neal,” according to Angleton.25 O’Neal, Egerter and Miler all play interesting roles in this case.

    SIG is all-important in the case of the Kennedy assassination because, for whatever reason, SIG held a 201 file on Lee Oswald prior to the assassination. Both the Church Committee and HSCA investigators fixated quickly on this point, because it made no sense under the CIA’s scenario of their relationship (or, as they professed, non-relationship) with Oswald. What did SIG really do, and why would Oswald’s file have been there? Why wasn’t it opened when this ex-Marine (who had knowledge of the CIA’s top secret U-2 program) defected in 1959, telling embassy personnel he might have something of special interest to share with the Soviets? Why didn’t that set off alarm bells all over the place? Why was a 201 file on Oswald not opened for another year after that event? And why, when he returned to the States, did the CIA not debrief him? Or did they? These questions and more were adequately raised, to the HSCA’s credit, but not adequately answered by CIA.

    Let’s start with the first issue. What did SIG do? Angleton described the primary task of SIG to the Church committee in this fashion:

    The primary task was the penetration of the Agency and the government and historical penetration cases are recruitment of U.S. officials in positions, code clerks. It had a very tight filing system of its own, and it was the only component in counterintelligence that had access to the security files and the personnel maintained by the Office of Security.26

    The Office of Security’s primary role was to protect the CIA from harm. This involves monitoring the CIA’s own employees and assets to ensure that no one leaks data about the CIA, or betrays the CIA in any way. Because of the nature of what was done there, Office of Security files were the most closely guarded in the Agency. It is significant, therefore, that Angleton’s CI/SIG group had access to these files. It is also significant that the Office of Security also had a file on Oswald, and was running an operation against the FPCC at the time Oswald was attaching himself visibly to that organization.

    To the HSCA, Angleton gave a slightly enlarged definition:

    …it had many duties that had to do with other categories of sensitive cases involving Americans and other things which were not being handled by anybody else or just falling between the stools and so on.27

    Asked whether SIG’s charter would elucidate its operational mandate, Angleton replied,

    It would probably be in fairly camoflauged terms, yes. It was not a unit, however, whose duties were in other words, explained to people. I mean, in training school and do on it was very much fuzzed over if anyone was laying out the CI staff.28

    According to Angleton’s close associate Raymond G. Rocca, SIG

    …was set up to handle especially sensitive cases in the area of security or personnel and in particular, cases involving security of personnel who were also of operational interest, as operators.

    In other words, it was an interface with the Office of Security.29

    When asked what would cause CI/SIG to open a 201 file on someone, Rocca gave this answer:

    I would imagine that they would have had that occasion whenever a question arose that concerned people that came within the purview of the mission that I have described, namely, the penetration of our operations or the advancement of our particular interests with respect to the security of those operations …. I mean, there were many sensitive areas that involved aspects, that involved sources and access to materials that were of higher classification than what you have shown me.30

    When the conversation is brought around to Oswald in particular, Rocca’s answer is even more interesting:

    Rocca: Let me go back and open a little parenthesis about this. What I regard now, in the light of what you said, is probably a too narrow view of what SIG was interested in.

    They were also concerned with Americans as a security threat in a community-wide sense, and they dealt with FBI cases, with the Office of Security cases, and with other cases on the same level, as they dealt with our own, basically …. It would be with respect to where and what had happened to DDP materials with respect to a defection in any of these places.

    Goldsmith: Again, though, Oswald had nothing to do with the DDP at this time, at least apparently.

    Rocca: I’m not saying that. You said it. [Emphasis added.]31

    Rocca’s answer hangs out there, teasing us with ambiguity. Did Oswald have something to do with the Directorate of Plans, the DDP?

    The rest of this article can be found in The Assassinations, edited by Jim DiEugenio and Lisa Pease.

    Notes

    1. Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior / James Jesus Angleton: The CIA’s Master Spy Hunter (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), p. 10.

    2. Biographical data from Thomas Mangold, Cold Warrior, Chapter 2. This particular quote appears on page 33.

    3. Miles Copeland, The Real Spy War (London: First Sphere Books edition, 1978), pp. 41-42.

    4. Copeland, p. 42.

    5. Mangold, p. 45.

    6. Mangold, p. 44.

    7. Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrtes: Richard Helms and the CIA (New York, Pocket Books ed., 1979), p. 35.

    8. Mark Aarons and John Loftus, Unholy Trinity (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), p. 89. There are several long passages about Angleton’s relationship with Montini, the ratlines, and the Vatican throughout the book. Montini became Pope after the 1963 death of the very liberal Pope John XXIII, about whom the movie The Shoes of the Fisherman was made.

    9. Aarons and Loftus, p. 237.

    10. Angleton, 10/5/78 HSCA deposition, p. 92.

    11. Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential (New York: Pocket Books ed., 1994), p. 280

    12. Summers, pp. 280-281

    13. Lisa Pease, “Novel & Company: Phillips, Banister, Arcacha and Ferrie,” Probe Vol. 4 No. 6 Sept-Oct 1997, p. 32.

    14. Summers, p. 281

    15. Copeland, p. 44.

    16. Copeland, p. 41.

    17. David Wise, Molehunt (New York: Avon Books ed., 1992), p. 31

    18. Wise, p. 32.

    19. Wise, p. 32.

    20. Mangold, p. 51

    21. Mangold, p. 52

    22. Mangold, p. 52

    23. Wise, p. 121.

    24. The Doolittle report contained this famous instruction: “If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of ëfiar play’ must be reconsidered,” and “We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us.” Quoted in David Martin, Wilderness of Mirrors (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), p. 62.

    25. Angleton 9/17/75 Church Committee Deposition (hereafter Angleton 9/17/75 Deposition), p. 16.

    26. Angleton 9/17/75 Deposition, p. 17.

    27. Angleton HSCA Deposition, p. 146.

    28. Angleton HSCA Deposition, p. 146.

    29. HSCA Deposition of Raymond G. Rocca (hereafter Rocca HSCA Deposition), p. 206

    30. Rocca HSCA Deposition, p. 207.

    31. Rocca HSCA Deposition, p. 218

    32. HSCA Deposition of Ann Elizabeth Goldsborough Egerter (hereafter Egerter HSCA Deposition), p. 8.

    33. Egerter HSCA Deposition, p. 9.

    34. Egerter HSCA Deposition, pp. 9-10.

    35. Egerter HSCA Deposition, p. 10.

    36. Egerter HSCA Deposition, p. 25.

    37. Egerter HSCA Deposition, pp. 22-24.

    38. Egerter HSCA Deposition, pp. 43-44.

    39. Angleton 2/6/75 Church Committee Deposition (hereafter Angleton 2/6/75 Deposition), p. 21. Schweiker says, “We had a CIA employee who testified to us that he saw a contact report on Oswald over at Langley.”

    40. Angleton 2/6/75 Deposition, pp. 20-26

    41. The Eldon Henson story is documented in John Newman’s Oswald and the CIA (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1995). But a near identical episode is also described by David Atlee Phillips in his memoir, The Nightwatch (New York: Ballantine Books, 1977). Compare Phillips’ account, pp. 162-164 (paperback version), with Newman’s account, pp. 362-362. Then look at the document of this episode, published on page 507 of Newman’s book. Note that “[redacted] witnessed meeting from nearby table.” In his account, Phillips describes watching the trap his agent was setting for Hensen from a nearby table in a restaurant. According to the document, Hensen was speaking with Maria Luisa Calderon, a woman who appeared to perhaps have some foreknowledge of the assassination. (See Rocca HSCA Deposition, pp. 163-164.) Curiouser and curiouser.

    42. Newman, p. 32.

    43. Rocca HSCA deposition, p. 230.

    44. Angleton 9/17/75 Deposition, p. 30.

    45. Angleton 9/17/75 Deposition, p. 33.

    46. Reproductions of these cards can be seen in Newman, p. 479.

    47. Rocca HSCA deposition, pp. 226-227.

    48. Newman, pp. 221-222.

    49. Angleton 9/17/75 Deposition, p. 38 and p. 62. The project chief was John Mertz, and evidently Birch O’Neal was involved as well, (pp. 62, 64) but in Angleton’s words, “Mr. Miler … had the day to day work” and described Miler as the principal person to talk to about it. p. 120.

    50. Martin, p. 140.

    51. Egerter HSCA Deposition, p. 15

    52. Egerter HSCA Deposition, p. 30.

    53. Egerter HSCA Deposition, pp. 31-38.

    54. Rocca HSCA Deposition, p. 210.

    55. Rocca HSCA Depostion, p. 212.

    56. Philip Agee, Inside the Company: CIA Diary (New York: Bantam Books, 1989 ed.), p. 49.

    57. Letter from Sullivan to Belmont, dated May 13, 1964.

    58. Angleton 2/6/75 Deposition, pp. 34-38

    59. Joseph B. Smith, Portrait of a Cold Warrior (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1976), p. 397.

    60. Smith, p. 397.

    61. Harvey’s notes were uncovered by the Church Committee. Quotes here come from Martin, pp. 121-123.

    62. Wise, p. 121.

    63. Wise, p. 176.

    64. Powers, p. 107.

    65. Agee, p. 358.

    66. Bill Davy, Let Justice Be Done (Reston: Jordan Publishing, 1999), pp. 88-89 and Davy, “File Update”, Probe, Jan-Feb 2000, pp. 4-5.

    67. Davy, Let Justice Be Done, p. 88.

    68. For an example, read about the Loginov episode in Cold Warrior, Chapter 1.

    69. Wise, p. 69.

    70. HSCA Deposition of Scelso (John Whitten), p. 71.

    71. “Hunt says C.I.A. Had Assassin Unit,” New York Times 12/26/75, page 9, column 1.

    72. Mark Lane, Plausible Denial (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991), p. 164.

    73. Martin, p. 34.

    74. Martin, p. 144.

    75. Angleton Deposition to the Church Committee, 6/19/75 (hereafter Angleton 6/19/76 Deposition), p. 87.

    76. Peter Wright, Spycatcher (New York: Dell, 1987), pp. 201-205.

    77. Angleton 6/19/75 Deposition, p. 84.

    78. Scelso/Whitten Deposition, p. 168-169.

    79. Rocca HSCA Deposition, pp. 8-9.

    80. Rocca HSCA Deposition, p. 9.

    81. RIF 104-10086-10003, date not readable, cable apparently from JMWAVE to the Mexico City Station.

    82. Cable 57610, from DIRECTOR to Mexico [ ] JMWAVE, dated 12 Nov 65. See p. 29 this issue.

    83. Agee, p. 319.

    84. Cable 58683, from DIRECTOR to MEXI, dated 16 Nov 65. See p. 29 this issue.

  • Edward Epstein: Warren Commission Critic?


    UPDATE

    In this review, The Nation exposes Edward Epstein as a trickster journalist, but Probe Magazine knew that decades ago, as the following article demonstrates.

    From the November-December 1999 issue (Vol. 7 No. 1) of Probe


    Edward Epstein was an early critic of the Warren Commission who has written three books on the Kennedy assassination and several articles on the same subject. Epstein went to Cornell where he majored in political science and was planning on becoming a teacher. But for his master’s thesis he hit upon the idea of writing about the internal problems of the Warren Commission on its way to their problematic conclusions about the Kennedy case. The book proposal was submitted to a publisher and six months later, in early 1966, it hit the bookstores and became a best-seller. Epstein then went on to Harvard and got his Ph. D. He taught for a short time at MIT and then later at UCLA before becoming a full-time writer. Since then he has served as a contributing editor to The New Yorker and written several books, most of them related to various aspects of intelligence work.

    In the mid-sixties, while working on Inquest, Epstein got acquainted with the fledgling research community on the Kennedy case. At that time, it was quite small, consisting of perhaps 20-25 serious people who formed an internal network of meetings, phone calls, and correspondence. One of the prominent members of this network was Sylvia Meagher who lived in New York. Another was Vince Salandria who lived in Philadelphia. Epstein came into contact with both, especially Meagher. In fact, the late great critic actually helped index Inquest.

    But it didn’t take long for both critics and the community itself, to become disenchanted with Epstein. It happened shortly after the publication of Inquest. For that project, Epstein had somehow obtained access to some important people involved with the Commission. As he described it in a radio interview with Larry King (2/28/79):

    So I started by writing letters to the different people on the Warren Commission which included Gerald Ford … Allen Dulles, the former director of the CIA; Chief Justice Warren; senators, congressmen – and everyone, to my amazement, agreed to see me.

    This is curious in itself. But on that same show Epstein expressed his intent in writing the book:

    My book Inquest was really on a single problem – that the Warren Commission failed to find the truth, and there were two main reasons for that. One: they were acting under pressure … . And secondly, they had to rely on other agencies … . And these agencies had themselves things to hide. So it was not a question of the Warren Commission being dishonest: it was a question that the way the investigation was organized, it would have been impossible for it to find an exhaustive truth.

    Later, Epstein was asked by King:

    King: First, should we have appointed a commission like the Warren Commission?

    Epstein: Well, – yes – I believe that the men who served on the Warren Commission served in good faith.

    Epstein has been consistent with this attitude ever since. That the Warren Commission did an unsatisfactory job, not because of any wrongdoing of its own, but because of the time constraints placed on them and because of secrets about Oswald that were hidden from them. Yet, Epstein insists they did get it right:

    King: Did Oswald kill John Kennedy

    Epstein: Yes, I believe he did.

    King: Acting alone …in Dealey Plaza that day?

    Epstein: I think he was the only rifleman … .

    What Epstein is saying is that although the Warren Commission was not an in-depth, exhaustive investigation, its ultimate conclusion – that Oswald shot JFK – was on the money. Secondly, as he stated on the King program, if there was a cover-up, it was a benign one. That is, the FBI and CIA should have known Oswald was a dangerous character from his recent activities. In reality, Epstein in Inquest was the first advocate of the thesis that the “errors” of the Warren Commission were done to cover up mistakes by the intelligence agencies in their surveillance of the dangerous Marxist Lee Oswald. This was the track taken decades later on the thirtieth anniversary of Kennedy’s death by journals like Newsweek and CIA related writers like Walter Pincus. This was done just before the Assassination Records and Review Board was about to disclose millions of pages of new documents that completely undermine this whole concept.

    Best-Seller vs. Best Book

    It is interesting to compare Epstein’s book with Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment. Lane’s book came out two months after Epstein’s. Although Epstein’s book sold well, Lane’s quickly and greatly surpassed it on the charts. As Epstein told King:

    Well, my book, I was actually published …in April and Lane’s book was published in June, and Lane’s book became a sort of number one best-seller and Lane was on TV – and my book was a best-seller too, but it sort of faded away, and Lane’s book is remembered by everyone.

    There is a likely reason for this. Lane’s book showed that the Commission could not have been working in good faith. He did this in two related ways. First, he brought into the gravest doubt every major conclusion of the Commission. Second, he showed that the Commission had in its hands evidence that contradicted their conclusions. (Sylvia Meagher did the same in her wonderful Accessories After the Fact, published in 1967.) And Meagher was quite disappointed in Epstein’s performance when it came to debating the opposition. In a letter she circulated in 1966, Meagher expressed her chagrin over a debate televised in New York between Epstein and Commission counsel Wesley Liebeler. She wrote privately that “Epstein was absolutely disastrous. I really let him have it the next morning and haven’t heard from him since. I learned later that at least three other people afterwards gave him a tongue-lashing for his extremely weak position, his capitulating and almost apologizing to Liebeler. (Letter of 8/30/66) On the other hand, when Lane debated Liebeler at UCLA on January 25, 1967, by most accounts he obliterated him.

    The questions about Epstein deepened around the time of the Garrison investigation. First, Epstein’s voice appeared on a record album that accompanied the book The Scavengers and Critics of the Warren Report. This should not be passed over lightly, for this 1967 book was the first one to go after the critics on a personal and demeaning level, making them out to be a bunch of kooks and eccentrics who did what they did out of some psychological or other weirdness. Schiller was later exposed by declassified documents as being a chronic FBI informant on the Kennedy case. On the album, entitled The Controversy, Epstein joins in the ridicule of the critics. Around this same time period, Epstein appeared in a debate with Salandria, arguing the case against Oswald. Salandria was so outraged that after the debate, he asked if Epstein had gone over to the other side.


    Read the full article in its original form below.

    (Click here if your browser is having trouble loading the above.)


    See also:

    “Focus on the Media: Edward J. Epstein”

    “The Abstract Reality of Edward Epstein”

  • What Did Otto Otepka Know About Oswald and the CIA?


    From the March-April, 1997 issue (Vol. 4 No. 3) of Probe


    Otto Otepka once told journalist Sarah McClendon that he knew who had killed JFK, but would say no more on the subject.1 What might he have been in a position to know?

    As head of the State Department’s Office of Security (SY), Otto Otepka was responsible for issuing or denying security clearances for State Department personnel. He took his job very seriously. In 1958, Otepka was awarded for Meritorious Service by no less than John Foster Dulles. The award lauded Otepka’s “loyalty and devotion to duty” as well as his “sound judgment, creative work and unusual responsibilities”, adding that Otepka “reflected great credit upon himself and the Department and has served as an incentive to his colleagues.”2

    Not a McCarthyite

    Otepka has often been unfairly portrayed as a right-wing clone of Senator Joe McCarthy. But the record does not support this caricature. In fact, Otepka crossed swords with Joe McCarthy in 1953 over Wolf Ladejinksy, a State Department agricultural expert who had once been employed by a Soviet trade agency. Despite such an obvious affiliation, Otepka’s evaluation cleared Ladejinsky of McCarthy’s unfair charges. Otepka himself has stated,

    I thought my whole record would prove I was not a McCarthyite. I had never approved of Senator McCarthy’s tactics. Everyone in the security field knew that.3

    November 5, 1963, Otto Otepka was unceremoniously fired from State based on charges that were unfounded.

    How did Otepka fall so far from grace? And could it have had anything to do with his investigation of Lee Harvey Oswald?

    Otto Otepka’s troubles started in December of 1960. Otepka’s biographer William Gill clearly believes that Otepka’s problems stemmed originally from Otepka’s continued denial of a security clearance for the former OSS veteran Walt Rostow. Otepka had denied him clearance twice before, and in December of 1960, Dean Rusk, newly appointed Secretary of State, visited Otepka in person to ask what Rostow’s chances would be of getting cleared at that time. Otepka was unable to give Rusk any reason to believe Rostow would ever receive clearance, and Rusk subsequently placed Rostow in the White House as a member of Kennedy’s personal staff, specifically as McGeorge Bundy’s second in command on national security matters.

    Walt Whitman Rostow was the brother of Eugene Rostow. In Professor Don Gibson’s article about the creation of the Warren Commission, (Probe, May-June 1996) Gibson revealed Eugene Rostow’s primary role in the formation of that body. Eugene’s call was made less than two and a half hours after Oswald was killed. Walt Rostow also shared something in common with the CIA’s legendary Counterintelligence Chief, James Angleton. He did not believe in the Sino-Soviet split.4 Rostow was no communist, but in fact a hawkish Cold Warrior.

    Walt Rostow was one of Kennedy’s “counterinsurgency” experts. “He made counterinsurgency seem profound, reasonable, and eminently just,” said author Gerald Colby in his book Thy Will Be Done. Walt Rostow – like Dean Rusk, Roswell Gilpatrick, Edward Lansdale, Paul Nitze, Harland Cleveland, Roger Hilsman, Lincoln Gordon, Adolf Berle, McGeorge Bundy and Henry Kissinger – came to work in the Kennedy administration directly from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s Special Studies Project. This group had been hand-chosen by Nelson Rockefeller to assist him when he himself was seeking the Presidency. Author Colby called this “Nelson’s Secret Victory”, pointing out that while Kennedy knew many powerful people, they were mostly politicians, not men with experience in foreign affairs. The Rockefeller family network, and Nelson’s group in particular, provided a large assortment of bright, qualified men. However, with such a homogenous group surrounding him, Colby noted, “there was no one to advise the young president on the wisdom and efficacy of such covert operations as the Bay of Pigs invasion, the CIA’s secret war in Indochina, Project Eagle, or Lumumba’s murder.”5

    Otepka’s biographer doesn’t seem to understand the distinction between Kennedy and this group. He insinuates that Bobby was behind Walt Rostow’s rise and Otepka’s fall. Bobby was originally the true believer in counterinsurgency as a means for conducting limited warfare and thus saving a greater number of lives than in outright war, which at that point in time seemed to mean nuclear war. But Bobby became disenchanted himself with both Rusk and Rostow and their type of counterinsurgency. Colby includes the text of one of Bobby’s speeches as released to the press, in which was written, “Victory in a revolutionary war is not won by escalation, but by de-escalation.” Kennedy did not actually speak these words when the speech was delivered, but the words were widely quoted by the press.6

    Investigating Oswald

    Was the denial of clearance for Rostow the trigger for Otepka’s eventual downfall? Or could it have been a letter that went out a few weeks earlier? In a letter dated October 25, 1960, Hugh Cummings of State’s Intelligence and Research Bureau wrote a letter to Richard Bissell at CIA, requesting information on defectors to the Soviet Union. Number eight on the list of eighteen names was Lee Harvey Oswald. In the book Spooks, Jim Hougan writes that,

    According to Otepka, the study on defectors was initiated by him because neither the CIA nor military intelligence agencies would inform the State Department which defectors to the Soviet Union were double agents working for the United States.7

    Although Otepka remained in the dark, within the CIA there seemed to be fewer questions as to for whom Oswald worked.

    When State’s request came to CIA, Bissell turned the request over to two places: James Angleton’s Counterintelligence (CI) staff, and Sheffield Edwards’ Office of Security (OS) staff. In OS, Robert Bannerman, himself a former SY official and a colleague of Otepka’s, told his people to coordinate their response with CI. Evidently, Bannerman knew that Angleton’s CI staff, as opposed to the Soviet Russia Division (SR), would have the answers State needed. Paul Gaynor, of OS’s Security Research Staff (SRS), also seemed to have special knowledge that Angleton would be the appropriate person to handle this request. He passed Bannerman’s request for a coordinated response for State to Marguerite Stevens of SRS.

    John Newman, in Oswald and the CIA, describes the unusual nature of Gaynor’s framing of this request:

    This request, as Gaynor relayed it to Stevens, however, was worded in a peculiar way, as if to dissuade her from doing research on seven people. Bannerman specified that he wanted information on American defectors other than Bernon F. Mitchell and William H. Martin, and five other defectors regarding whom Mr. Otepka of the State Department Security Office already has information. One of the “five other defectors” that Stevens was not supposed to look into was Lee Harvey Oswald.8 [Newman’s emphasis]

    Readers of Probe will remember from the last issue how CIA told the Headquarters offices of the FBI, State and INS that the CIA had already given information (re Oswald’s Mexico City trip) to the field offices of the same entities, which proved to be a lie. Is this a similar lie? Did Otepka have the information already? No, according to Otepka. In addition, we know now that Angleton’s CI/SIG chief, Birch D. O’Neal, prepared his own response regarding these “defectors”. And 10th on the list was Oswald. And more importantly, Oswald’s particular entry was marked SECRET.9 And again, as described in the last Probe, SIG – the Special Investigations Group – contained Angleton’s private handful of his most closed-mouth associates.

    It’s significant that both Bannerman and Gaynor knew that the appropriate area for responding to inquiries about Oswald was Angleton’s CI staff. It’s interesting too how Gaynor relayed a response to a subordinate, Marguerite Stevens, in a manner that did not indicate to her that someone else in CIA had information on Oswald.

    Another significant element in CI/SIG’s response was that it included a known lie. Oswald was listed as having “renounced” his citizenship.10 Although Oswald had attempted renunciation, he had not followed through and was still considered by both governments a citizen of the United States. Newman muses of this assertion, “Was CI/SIG truly incompetent or spinning some counterintelligence yarn?”11 The latter seems more likely, in light of other events.

    The Opening of Oswald’s 201 File

    Late November, 1960, Angleton’s staff sent Bissell their proposed response to State, which Bissell signed and forwarded. Yet we are to believe that, despite this obvious flurry of attention, just a few days later, on December 9, 1960, CI/SIG’s Ann Egerter opened a 201 file in the name of Lee Henry Oswald. Newman has stated that he thinks this name might have been the result of a simple mistake. While this response seems strained for a file that was restricted, as this one was, this explanation is even more weak in light of the recent attention focused on one Lee Harvey Oswald preceding the opening of this file. In fact, Egerter herself directly related the opening of the file to State’s request for information when deposed by the HSCA. Does this make any sense? It seems more like Egerter was trying to hide the CIA’s knowledge of Oswald, than preparing to divulge more of it.

    Newman raises an interesting issue by quoting a memo from the man who later took Angleton’s position, George T. Kalaris. Kalaris gave a different version of why the 201 file was opened at that time, which states flatly:

    Lee Harvey Oswald’s 201 file was first opened as a result of his “defection” to the USSR on 31 Oct 1959 and renewed interest in Oswald brought about by his queries concerning possible reentry into the United States.12

    One of Oswald’s own letters supports Kalaris’ assertion. Oswald wrote to the American Embassy in Moscow in early 1961:

    Since I have not received a reply to my letter of December, 1960, I am writing again asking that you consider my request for the return of my American passport.13

    Newman quotes from an ABC Nightline broadcast from 1991, in which ABC claims that the KGB had intercepted this letter and that the original still exists in Soviet files. Newman further points out that only some extraordinary source or method could have relayed this information to the CIA so quickly for them to open the 201 file by December 9th. Even if Oswald wrote on December 1st, how did the CIA, continents away, learn the contents of a letter in the cold war Soviet Union within eight days? And more importantly, what would that indicate about the level of interest the CIA really had in Oswald, to be monitoring him so closely? In addition, Newman points out that,

    Throughout Oswald’s stay in the Soviet Union, an Agency element which appears regularly on cover sheets for Oswald documents is CI/OPS, which means “Counterintelligence Operations.” If Oswald was a dangle, this might suggest that it was a counterintelligence operation run by Angleton.

    Whatever the truth of the opening of the 201 file and the true purpose of Oswald’s trip to the Soviet Union, Otepka’s request for information sparked a chain of communications to Angleton’s unit, which then lied about Oswald in response. And Otepka’s life irrevocably changed. From December 1960, whether due to his refusal to clear Rostow, his poking into Oswald, or some other reason, Otepka started being taken off any “sensitive” security cases. It seemed Otepka’s reputation for meticulous attention to detail and thoroughness was making him a problem in SY. Why? Who was threatened by a man doing a good job?

    Downward Spiral

    An incredible, three year campaign unfolded against Otepka. Because of his stellar record, no one dared fire him. But all kinds of efforts were spent trying to make him want to quit, starting with his removal from the most sensitive cases in December, 1960. The first public attack began when stories appeared in the press that State – and specifically Otepka’s security area – would be undergoing a “reduction in force.”14

    Shortly thereafter, Otepka was called before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS), of which Senator James Eastland was Chair and Senator Thomas Dodd a vocal member. Otepka had gotten to know Jay Sourwine, the subcommittee’s Chief Counsel. Informally, Otepka had shared some of his concerns for what he saw as a loosening of the clearance procedures with Sourwine. Sourwine and the subcommittee quickly began, with Dodd presiding, to hold what came to be known as the Otepka hearings. In the subcommittee’s subsequent report, the members concluded that the release of the news stories was meant to cause Otepka’s voluntary resignation.

    Since this effort failed, other steps had to be taken. Otepka’s superior in SY tried to entice Otepka into taking a position in a different division. But Otepka refused, and none too soon, since that division was dissolved a mere two months later.15 Next, Otepka was shifted into a position that was essentially a demotion. Still, Otepka hung on, trying to do the job he felt needed to be done.

    Otepka had found that Rusk had appointed a number of officials to State under a blanket waiver that effectively backdated security clearances for the new officials. Otepka tried to raise his concern with his superiors, and urged them to go to SISS. But SY just wanted Otepka to look the other way.

    In 1962, John Francis Reilly took control of SY. From the very beginning, he too seemed to be on a mission to get rid of Otepka. Otepka’s biographer relates this encounter, just weeks into Reilly’s term:

    Smiling broadly, [Reilly] asked, “Where’s your rabbit’s foot?” Mystified, Otepka raised his eyebrows in question. Reilly laughed and, maintaining his air of benevolent affability, he explained that Otepka had just been selected to attend the National War College. This was an honor usually reserved for Foreign Service officers marked for higher things. Being human, Otepka was naturally pleased. Reilly seemed genuinely delighted that such good fortune had befallen a member of his staff and just for a moment, Otepka was taken in. He accepted the appointment with thanks, and perhaps with a sense of relief that he could escape, at least temporarily, from the strained atmosphere that prevailed in SY. Reilly shrewdly asked him to put his acceptance in writing.

    That same day, May 7, Otepka wrote Reilly a memorandum formally expressing his willingness to attend the War College for ten months beginning in August. However, he could not resist adding, tongue in cheek, that the appointment had come as something of a surprise to him because the State Department had repeatedly assured him, the Congress, and the public that he would be kept in a responsible position in the Office of Security. Reilly returned this memo with the request that Otepka delete his comments on the Department’s premises. Otepka complied.16

    Reilly, however, overplayed his hand. His overdone praise made Otepka a bit uneasy, and he decided to do a little checking on his own. What he found was that his appointment had not been entered with the regular nominations, but was entered as a last minute emergency-type nomination. Otepka then asked Reilly if by accepting, he would still be able to return to his post at State. Reilly admitted he would have to fill Otepka’s spot, and there would be no place to which Otepka could return. With that, Otepka rejected this “honor” and chose to remain in place.

    Less than a week after Otepka’s refusal, Reilly placed his first spy, Fred Traband, in Otepka’s office. More would follow. Reilly also brought in a National Security Agency (NSA) alumnus, David Belisle, to work with Otepka. Belisle brought with him a new “short form” procedure to rush through people’s security clearances. Otepka was appalled, but powerless. Belisle took away Otepka’s card-file index, the product of years of work. Otepka was removed from the FBI’s after-hours call list, which was another demotion. For a short time, Otepka was seriously thinking of quitting. Ironically, it was his buddy, Jay Sourwine, who talked him out of it. Ironically because it was this very relationship that most contributed to Otepka’s eventual downfall.

    Sourwine started working on Otepka to get him to divulge what was really going on behind the scenes at State. But as usual, being a by-the-book person, Otepka insisted on following protocol. If Sourwine wanted him to testify before SISS, the subcommittee would have to formally request his testimony. And then, Otepka insisted on getting clearance from his superiors before testifying. Was Sourwine truly interested in helping Otepka, or was he part of a plot to entrap Otepka into saying something that would finally provide the justification for Otepka’s ouster?

    In mid-February, 1963, Otepka was formally notified that his appearance was requested before SISS. Otepka testified to the subcommittee on four different occasions. At the very first hearing, Sourwine asked the question relating to the cause of Otepka’s appearance before the committee in the first place. He asked if Otepka had been subjected to any “reprisals” from State because of his previous testimony. But Otepka was wary of saying anything that could make his already uncomfortable situation at SY worse, and defended both State and their treatment of him. Otepka defended his own actions, but would not point an accusatory finger at anyone else. Sourwine continued to press the matter with more subtle questions, until he got Otepka to talk about a case where Otepka conceded to being pressured to put through two security clearances where he didn’t feel one was justified. Otepka’s refusal to clear the persons delayed the formation of the committee to which these people had been appointed for over a year. And in the end, through Otepka’s persistence, they were both dropped from the committee.17

    One of Otepka’s biggest heresies, however, was disclosing to the Senate subcommittee that, despite the subcommittee’s earlier report and recommendations from the earlier Otepka hearings, State had continued to process under blanket waivers nearly 400 people in the roles of file clerks and secretaries. As author Gill put it, “it is often easier for an obscure clerk or a trusted secretary to waltz off the premises with a top-secret document than it would be for an official at the policy-making level who is afraid he is being watched.”18 This greatly alarmed the senators, but Otepka added one more piece of information. There was an effort underway to reinstate Alger Hiss to the State Department. Knowing what we know today, one might wish that effort had been successful. But at the time, all that was known was that Hiss had been convicted of perjury and had been accused of espionage.

    High-Tech Harassment

    Shortly after the third or fourth appearance, Otepka began noticing trouble on his phone line. Chatter could be heard sometimes, other times calls wouldn’t go through, and sometimes there would be an amplification effect. Otepka was being bugged. And not just through the phone. Listening devices were installed in his office. What could someone possibly fear that Otepka might be discussing to warrant such intense surveillance?

    And then there was the night Otepka had been working late, stepped out for dinner, and then returned to work some more. Imagine his surprise when, around 10pm, David Belisle and another NSA spook entered his office, thinking he was gone for the night. Belisle made the flimsy excuse that he had been concerned by a cleaning woman he claimed to have seen entering Otepka’s office. But Otepka had been sitting there for some time, and called Belisle on this lie.19

    When Otepka’s regular secretary fell sick, one Joyce Schmelzer was placed in his office with orders to spy on Otepka. One of her tasks was to gather the burn bag each night, mark it with a big red “X”, then call to alert another SY member that Otepka’s burn bag was on the way down. The trash was searched regularly for any incriminating information that could be used against Otepka.

    For weeks, his house was under surveillance. His wife, tired of seeing the man in the car parked across the street every night, called the local police. After the police forced the man to identify himself (he worked for a private security firm), the man never reappeared.

    Was Otepka keeping people with carefully constructed communist-like backgrounds from being placed, on behalf of intelligence agencies, in State for official cover? It would seem his offenses must have been extraordinary to warrant such high-level harassment. Was someone out to discredit Otepka in case he later spilled the beans on one particularly sensitive case?

    Someone had even drilled a hole into his safe, and with a mirror determined the correct combination, and then plugged the hole again. What could someone possibly fear that Otepka might be discussing to warrant such intense surveillance? According to Otepka, the only sensitive material in the safe was his half-finished study of American defectors in the Soviet Union, with a yet to be completed determination on one Lee Harvey Oswald. When Hougan asked Otepka specifically if Otepka had been able to figure out if Oswald was an agent of the US or not, Otepka answered, “We had not made up our minds when my safe was drilled and we were thrown out of the office.”20

    Amazingly, the people involved in harassing Otepka did little to cover their tracks. It was an open secret that Otepka was being tapped. And Otepka still had many friends in State, who told him who was responsible for many of these activities. Meanwhile, Reilly was trying to undermine Otepka’s support on SISS. He told all kinds of lies about what Otepka had done on various security cases and directly contradicted Otepka’s testimony before the subcommittee. Otepka was appalled. The Senate subcommittee was in quandry about who to believe – Otepka, or his SY superior. Sourwine told Otepka he would need something other than his word. He would need documents. Again, one should consider what followed in regards to the question of whether Sourwine was engaging in some form of entrapment.

    Preparing the Defense

    For ten days, Otepka gathered his evidence. He prepared a 39 page brief with 36 attachments to support his own testimony and directly refute that of Reilly’s. Of the attachments, 25 were unclassified; six were marked “Official Use Only”, three were marked “Limited Official Use”; and two were marked “Confidential.”21

    Otepka was careful that none of what he divulged to the Senate subcommittee was information that in any way could compromise the national security of the United States. And even the two marked “Confidential” were mere transmittal memorandums for more sensitive attachments, and Otepka did not turn over the attachments.

    The piece d’resistance in this affair was the manipulation of evidence taken from Otepka’s own safe. Sensitive documents were “found” in his burn bag one night, with the classification tags illegally clipped off. Otepka claimed, and the State Department never denied, that the evidence seems to support the contention that the documents were planted in his bags for the sole purpose of discrediting him. The day after these documents turned up, SISS called several SY members to the Hill to discuss the bugging of Otepka. The first man called was the spy Reilly had planted in Otepka’s office from the beginning, Fred Traband. Traband was so unnerved at being called, however, that, while denying knowledge of the tapping, he told the story behind the burn bag operation. The next man, Terry Shea, not only acknowledged the burn bag story, but added that Reilly had personally searched Otepka’s files and safe. The rest continued to deny any participation in or knowledge of the tapping of Otepka.

    House of Cards

    On June 27, 1963, Reilly unceremoniously shunted Otepka out of his office into a new, make-work position reviewing and updating policy manuals. Otepka was ordered to turn over the combination to his safe (which still held the unfinished Oswald study) and was sent to another office on another floor. He was denied access to his former records. Many of Otepka’s staff were purged from their positions at this time as well. On his new office wall, Otepka hung these words from Prime Minister Churchill:

    Never give in. Never, never, never, never! Never yield in any way, great or small, large or petty, except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force and the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.22

    Adrift without direction, Otepka took some time off, and then made the mistake of stopping by his old office for a look. Belisle heard about this and admonished Otepka to stay away. Otepka’s wife was surprised, when calling her husband at his office, to hear “Mr. Otepka is no longer here.” And Otepka’s phone was rigged so that he could receive no incoming calls himself. His buzzer was disabled. When a call for Otepka came in, a phone would ring in another location, where a secretary would have to answer the call, and then walk to his door, knock, and tell him to pick up the line, before he could receive the call. This also ensured no privacy, since anyone could be listening on the other end of his calls. One of the men involved in tapping Otepka, Elmer Hill, had his wiretap lab across from Otepka’s office.23

    Domestic Espionage?

    At the end of July, the other shoe dropped. Otepka was informed by the FBI that he was being formally charged with espionage. Years later, it was discovered this move was ordered by Rusk himself, and the order hand-delivered by Reilly to the Department of Justice. This, for turning documents over to a Senate subcommittee. He was also charged with having clipped security classifications from documents, something Otepka did not do.

    In our last issue of Probe, we told of another whistleblower, Richard Nuccio, and how he was punished for giving information to the congressional body legitimately designated to receive such. Peter Kornbluh, writing for the Washington Post, quoted a 1912 law which stated that “the right of employees …to furnish information to either House or Congress, or to a committee or member thereof, may not be interfered with or denied.” Otepka himself cited this same law to the FBI in defense of his own actions.

    Meanwhile, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee was going to bat for Otepka. They hauled before them what the committee later called the “lying trio” of Reilly, Belisle and Hill.24 All three were found to have committed perjury when they denied knowledge of the tap on Otepka.

    The Long Shadow of Walter Sheridan

    In an interesting and relevant side story, the tapes made from the bugging of Otepka’s office were passed to a man that was unidentified in the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee’s hearings. Jim Hougan, while researching a strange case of bugging on Capitol Hill, found a man, Sidney Goldberg, who claims that the man in the corridor was none other than Walter Sheridan.25 Walter Sheridan was the former NSA and FBI man who did so much to sabotage Jim Garrison during his investigation into Kennedy’s assassination. According to a source of Goldberg’s, Hougan wrote that Sheridan “disposed over the personnel and currency of whole units of the Central Intelligence Agency.”26 In addition, the same source claimed that Sheridan was behind the preservation of Belisle’s job with State when Belisle’s role in the bugging of Otepka was revealed. Belisle was not fired, but was transferred to Bonn, Germany. Sheridan denied having any role in these events. But is Sheridan to be believed, in light of the lies he put forth during the Garrison investigation?

    Despite the support of the committee, Otepka was on the way out. He was met at work on September 22, 1963, with a note saying “You are hereby notified that it is proposed to remove you from your appointment with the Department of State ….”27 Otepka was outraged at the charges:

    “I was not particularly disturbed by the charges regarding my association with Jay Sourwine or the data I’d furnished him for the subcommittee,” Otepka later recalled. “But I was shocked and angered to find that the State Department had resorted to a cheap, gangland frame-up to place me under charges for crimes it knew I had never committed.”28

    One would think that finally, Otepka’s ordeal would be over. One would be wrong. He had been fired from his career position at State. Yet even after this, Otepka was warned that his home phone was probably tapped! And just a few days later, the man who had originally divulged who was behind the tapping of Otepka, Stanley Holden, suffered a mysterious “accident.” Holden was a good friend of Otepka’s, and had himself been under surveillance. His face and tongue had been so badly cut that stitches were required. His own explanation of being hit in the face by a heavy spring did not seem to explain his wounds, and the rumor went around that he had been beaten up by those who didn’t like him talking.

    In a last ditch effort to preserve Otepka at State, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee wrote a brief letter, signed by every subcommittee member, which strongly urged Rusk to reconsider the decision to force Otepka out of State. But Otepka’s fate had already been sealed. On November 5, 1963, Otepka was finally formally ousted from the State Department. Just seventeen days later, Kennedy would be assassinated. And the killing would be pinned on the man Otepka was trying to investigate when he was removed from his office.

    Notes

    1. Sarah McClendon, Mr. President, Mr. President! (Santa Monica: General Publishing Group, 1996) p. 82

    2. William J. Gill, The Ordeal of Otto Otepka (New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1969), p. 56

    3. Gill, p. 232

    4. Gerald Colby and Charlotte Dennett, Thy Will Be Done (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 1995), p. 553

    5. Colby and Dennett, p. 343

    6. Colby and Dennett, pp. 542-543.

    7. Jim Hougan, Spooks (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1978) p. 371

    8. John Newman, Oswald and the CIA (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1995), p. 172

    9. Newman, p. 172

    10. Newman, p. 172

    11. Newman, p. 173

    12. Newman, p. 176

    13. Newman, p. 177

    14. Gill, p. 117

    15. Gill, p. 123

    16. Gill, pp. 161-162

    17. Gill, p. 235

    18. Gill, p. 238

    19. Gill, p. 243

    20. Hougan, p. 371

    21. Gill, p. 254

    22. Gill, p. 280

    23. Gill, p. 285

    24. Gill, p. 289

    25. Hougan, p. 128. Hougan wrote of a wiretap that was discovered that ran from Capitol Hill to the Esso building, terminating not in the basement, where most lines terminate, but on the top floor behind a locked door to which the phone company didn’t even have access. The floor was leased to the Justice Department’s Bureau of Prisons, and the room was marked as a “restricted area”. Goldberg had a source that claimed Walter Sheridan was the ultimate recipient of this tap. In addition, Bernard Fensterwald appears in this story. When he heard that Goldberg was on the trail of the tap, he walked into Goldberg’s office and offered to help. Fensterwald convinced Goldberg to sign a statement that wasn’t true under the guise that this would help him. The situation became a nightmare for Goldberg. Fensterwald also played a role in protecting the tap. The tap was brought to the attention of Senator Long’s Ad-Prac committee by Bernie Spindel, a famed wiretapper himself. Spindel claimed government agents were constantly working on the tap. Fensterwald then committed a “blunder”: he requested information on the cable from the telephone company. This had the effect of sending a warning to whoever was bugging the hill. Because such requests took several days to process, the buggers had plenty of time to remove the tap that was under investigation. Why would Fensterwald, a sophisticated lawyer who sat on a committee specifically involved with wiretapping issues, make such an obvious mistake?

    26. Hougan, p. 128

    27. Gill, p. 291

    28. Gill, p. 293